American Adam: Innocence, Tragedy and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century

by Lewis, R. W. B.

• ISBN13: 9780226476810
• ISBN10: 0226476812
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1959-05-01
• Publisher: Univ of Chicago Pr

Summary

Intellectual history is viewed in this book as a series of "great conversations"dramatic dialogues in which a culture's spokesmen wrestle with the leading questions of their times. In nineteenth-century America the great argument centered about De Crevecoeur's "new man," the American, an innocent Adam in a bright new world dissociating himself from the historic past. Mr. Lewis reveals this vital preoccupation as a pervasive, transforming ingredient of the American mind, illuminating history and theology as well as art, shaping the consciousness of lesser thinkers as fully as it shaped the giants of the age. He traces the Adamic theme in the writings of Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, Henry James, and others, and in an Epilogue he exposes their continuing spirit in the works of F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Ralph Ellison, J. D. Salinger, and Saul Bellow.

Author Biography

R. W. B. Lewis is professor emeritus of English and American Studies at Yale University.

Table of Contents

Prologue: The Myth and the Dialogue

The Danger of Innocence

The Case against the Past

The New Adam: Holmes and Whitman

The Fortunate Fall: The Elder

The Narrative Image

The Fable of the Critics

The Hero in Space

The Return into Time

Melville: The Apotheosis of Adam

The Past and the Perfect

The Function of History

The Real Presence

Epilogue: The Contemporary Situation Adam as Hero in the Age of Containment

Index

Table of Contents provided by Publisher. All Rights Reserved.