Reconstituting the American renaissance : Emerson, Whitman, and the politics of representation
Challenging the standard periodization of American literary history, Reconstituting the American Renaissance reinterprets the works of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman and the relationship of these two authors to each other. Jay Grossman argues that issues of political representation -- involving vexed questions of who shall speak and for whom -- lie at the heart of American political and literary discourse from the revolutionary era through the Civil War. By taking the mid-nineteenth-century period, traditionally understood as marking the advent of literary writing in the United States, and restoring to it the ways in which Emerson and Whitman engaged with eighteenth-century controversies, rhetorics, and languages about political representation, Grossman departs significantly from arguments that have traditionally separated American writing in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Reconstituting the American Renaissance describes how Emerson and Whitman came into the period of their greatest
Criticism, interpretation, etc
xii, 273 pages : illustrations, map ; 25 cm.
9780822331292, 9780822331162, 0822331292, 0822331160
51053429
Representative strategies
The rise of the representational arts in the United States
Rereading Emerson/Whitman
Class actions
Representing men