No abstract
This paper focuses on three American Romantic writers: Emerson, Thoreau, and Hawthorne, examining the problem of ghostliness or life not fully lived present in their works. The point of departure for the present discussion is Arnold Weinstein\’s analysis of Hawthorne’s short story “Wakefield,” suggesting that the main goal of its protagonist is an attempt to become real to himself. This paper finds similar issues to the ones tackled by Hawthorne in the essays by R.W. Emerson and H.D. Thoreau, and argues that the method applied by Wakefield, which is looking at one’s life from a distance, is also present in the two Transcendentalists’ writings, though often as a danger rather than a wished-for solution of the problem.
Many British travelers who visited America in the first half of the nineteenth century did so in order to see first-hand the democratic system and, depending on their own political views, warn their British readers against its dangers or present the U.S. as a model to imitate. My paper focuses on British travelogues written between the end of the Napoleonic wars (1815) and the American Civil War (1861), exploring how their authors conceived the American system and how they wanted to portray it to their compatriots. While progressive writers such as Harriet Martineau and Frances Wright believed that the young republic could, at most, be faulted on not being democratic and egalitarian enough, Tories such as Frances Trollope, Basil Hall and Charles Augustus Murray believed that the American model was harmful. The word “citizens” was used by them as a term of abuse, to signify people characterized by materialism and bad manners. They warned against equality, which they thought would result in leveling down, the tyranny of the majority and universal suffrage. The American model of citizenship seemed menacing especially in the 1830s and 1840s, when British Conservatives felt that the order of the Empire was threatened by the Radicals and the Chartist movement.
Reviewed by Justyna Fruzińska, University of Łódź. A new literary history of America is a fascinating and outrageous project. It is a perfectly post-modern literary history, one that does not even try to aim at completeness or coherence. Hence, among the authors of its individual chapters the reader will find American as well as European university professors along with poets, writers or artists; and among its contents works of literature along with documents, folk songs, entries on Alcoholics Anonymous, pornographic industry, or Mickey Mouse. The book is framed by two specific dates: 1507, when the name "America" appeared on the map, and November 4, 2008, when Barack Obama was elected president. It is within this timeline that particular works of literature are situated, but always with the accompanying historical context. The Puritans classically come together with the city upon a hill and witchcraft trials, though Absalom, Absalom! is clustered with Gone with the wind, which is far less conventional, if historically justified. This eclecticism proves that the distinction between highbrow and low-brow culture is long gone, and that literature cannot be separated from cultural or historical events at large. Most importantly, there is no one unified narrative called "the history of American literature", but rather a kaleidoscope of fragmentary data that can be gathered and mixed together in order to create a patchwork that may say something about America's culture. The essays composing the book are put in a chronological order, as the word "history" suggests, but no other divisions are present: no thematic blocks of literature versus history, no periodization as such. A reader who wants to study a chapter dedicated to a particular author to get some general knowledge about his/her works will be rather disappointed. The essays are fragmentary as they focus on chosen aspects of their subject matter, leaving other works unaddressed. The chapter devoted to Henry David Thoreau, for example, discuses at REVIEW Review 118
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