American Romanticism and the Marketplace

by Michael T. Gilmore

• ISBN13: 9780226293967
• ISBN10: 0226293963
• Format: Nonspecific Binding
• Copyright: 2010-02-01
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Summary

"This book can take its place on the shelf beside Henry Nash Smith'sVirgin Landand Leo Marx'sThe Machine in the Garden."Choice "[Gilmore] demonstrates the profound, sustained,engagementwith society embodied in the works of Emerson, Hawthorne, Thoreau and Melville. In effect, he relocates the American Renaissance where it properly belongs, at the centre of a broad social, economic, and ideological movement from the Jacksonian era to the Civil War. Basically, Gilmore's argument concerns the writers' participation in what Thoreau called 'the curse of trade.' He details their mixed resistance to and complicity in the burgeoning literary marketplace and, by extension, the entire ' economic revolution' which between 1830 and 1860 'transformed the United States into a market society'. . . . "The result is a model of literary-historical revisionism. Gilmore's opening chapters on Emerson and Thoreau show that 'transcendental' thought and language can come fully alive when understood within the material processes and ideological constraints of their time. . . . The remaining five chapters, on Hawthorne and Melville, contain some of the most penetrating recent commentaries on the aesthetic strategies of American Romantic fiction, presented withinand throughsome of the most astute, thoughtful considerations I know of commodification and the 'democratic public' in mid-nineteenth-century America. . . . Practically and methodologically,American Romanticism and the Marketplacehas a significant place in the movement towards a new American literary history. It places Gilmore at the forefront of a new generation of critics who are not just reinterpreting familiar texts or discovering new texts to interpret, but reshaping our ways of thinking about literature and culture."Sacvan Bercovitch,Times Literary Supplement"Gilmore writes with energy, clarity, and wit. The reader is enriched by this book." William H. Shurr,American Literature

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	ix
Introduction	1	(17)
Emerson and the Persistence of the Commodity	18	(17)
Walden and the ``Curse of Trade''	35	(17)
Hawthorne, Melville, and the Democratic Public	52	(19)
To Speak in the Marketplace: The Scarlet Letter	71	(25)
The Artist and the Marketplace in The House of the Seven Gables	96	(17)
Selling One's Head: Moby-Dick	113	(19)
``Bartleby, the Scrivener'' and the Transformation of the Economy	132	(14)
Afterword	146	(9)
Notes	155	(18)
Index	173