Hawthorne, History, and Politics: A Reassessment

Reznick, Scott M.

doi:10.1353/arq.2022.0001

Cited by 10 publications

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Political Liberalism and the Rise of American Romanticism

Reznick

2024

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The Vision of Principles explores how American literary Romanticism developed in response to pervasive conflicts over democracy’s moral dimensions in the early republic and antebellum eras. By recovering the long-under-examined tradition of political liberalism for literary studies, it traces how U.S. writers reacted to ongoing moral and political conflict by engaging with liberal thinkers and ideas as they endeavored to understand how individuals beholden to a divergent array of moral convictions might nevertheless share a stable and just political world—the very dilemma at the core of political liberalism. The Vision of Principles demonstrates how those philosophical engagements sparked Romanticism’s rise and eventual flourishing as U.S. writers increasingly embraced Romantic literary modes, emphasizing the imagination’s capacity for creative synthesis and the role it played in navigating the complexities of moral experience and in shoring up the habits of mind and feeling that are vital to a meaningful democratic culture. It offers revisionary readings of works by Charles Brockden Brown, Robert Montgomery Bird, James Fenimore Cooper, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Frederick Douglass, and Nathaniel Hawthorne to show how these Romantic writers were preoccupied with how individuals come to embrace their deepest convictions and what happens when they encounter others who see the world differently.

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Political Liberalism and the Rise of American Romanticism

Reznick

2024

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Introduction

Reznick

2024

Political Liberalism and the Rise of American Romanticism

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The chapter argues that American literary Romanticism developed as a direct response to pervasive conflict over democracy’s moral dimensions in the early republic and antebellum eras. The Introduction calls for a renewed attention to the tradition of political liberalism, particularly its roots in the violent aftermath of the Protestant Reformation and its modern synthesis in the work of John Rawls, not only to better comprehend the challenges and dilemmas of modern political life, but because U.S. writers frequently turned to liberal thinkers and ideas as they sought to make sense of the inherent contentiousness over democracy’s moral dimensions by interrogating the nature of moral belief itself. Those philosophical engagements sparked Romanticism’s flourishing as U.S. writers increasingly embraced Romantic literary modes emphasizing the imagination’s capacity for creative synthesis and the role it could therefore play in navigating the complexities of moral experience and in shoring up the habits of mind and feeling that are vital to a meaningful democratic culture. This Introduction explores some of the implications of this framework for Americanist literary studies and humanistic scholarship more generally.

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Notes

Reznick

2024

Political Liberalism and the Rise of American Romanticism

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Hawthorne, History, and Politics: A Reassessment

Cited by 10 publications

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Political Liberalism and the Rise of American Romanticism

Political Liberalism and the Rise of American Romanticism

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