Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and MelvilleThe award-winning Beneath the American Renaissance is a classic work on American literature. It immeasurably broadens our knowledge of our most important literary period, as first identified by F.O. Matthiessen's American Renaissance. With its combination of sharp critical insight, engaging observation, and narrative drive, it represents the kind of masterful cultural history for which David Reynolds is known. Here the major works of Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, and Dickinson receive striking, original readings set against the rich backdrop of contemporary popular writing. Now back in print, the volume includes a new foreword by historian Sean Wilentz that reveals the book's impact and influence. A magisterial work of criticism and cultural history, Beneath the American Renaissance will fascinate anyone interested in the genesis of America's most significant literary epoch and the iconic figures who defined it. |
Contents
3 | |
13 | |
PUBLIC POISON Sensationalism and Sexuality | 167 |
OTHER AMAZONS Womens Rights Womens Wrongs and the Literary Imagination | 335 |
THE GROTESQUE POSTURE Popular Humor and the American Subversive Style | 439 |
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Common terms and phrases
ambiguities American humor American Subversive antebellum artistic b'hoy becomes black humor Blithedale Romance Boston called character Confidence-Man contemporary Conventional crime Crockett dark-reform dark-temperance devices early Emerson Emily Dickinson female feminist fiction frontier humor fusion genre George Lippard grotesque Hawthorne Hawthorne's heroine human imagery images imagination immoral reform ironies Leaves of Grass likable criminal literary texts literature of misery major writers Marble Faun Melville Melville's metaphors Moby-Dick moral exemplar murder narrative narrator Neal newspapers nineteenth-century novelist paradoxes paragraph perverse Poe's poem poetic poetry political popular culture popular humor popular reform popular sensational Puritan Quaker City radical democrats radical-democrat readers Redburn religious rhetoric Scarlet Letter scene sensational literature sensational novels sensationalism sermon sexual social society spirit stereotypes story stylistic subsequent quotations Subversive Style symbol tale temperance themes Thompson Thoreau tion typical urban humor urban humorists whale White-Jacket Whitman wild woman women women's rights writings wrote York Young Goodman Brown