At Emerson's Tomb

by Rowe, John Carlos

• ISBN13: 9780231058957
• ISBN10: 0231058950
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1996-12-01
• Publisher: Columbia Univ Pr

Summary

Representative works are interpreted in light of the two great political movements of the nineteenth century: the abolition of slavery and the women's rights movement. By reexamining Emerson, Poe, Melville, Douglass, Walt Whitman, Chopin, and Faulkner and others, Rowe assesses the degree to which major writers' attitudes toward race, class, and gender contribute to specific political reforms in nineteenth and twentieth-century American culture.

Table of Contents

Preface	ix
At Emerson's Tomb	1	(16)
``Hamlet's Task'': Emerson's Political Writings	17	(25)
Antebellum Slavery and Modern Criticism: Edgar Allan Poe's Pym and ``The Purloined Letter''	42	(21)
A Critique of Ideology: Herman Melville's Pierre	63	(33)
Between Politics and Poetics: Frederick Douglass' Narrative of the Life of an American Slave, Written by Himself	96	(28)
Reconstructing the Family: Harriet Jacobs' Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl	124	(21)
The Body Poetic: Walt Whitman's Drum-Taps	145	(17)
Fatal Speculations-Murder, Money, and Manners: Mark Twain's The Gilded Age and Pudd'nhead Wilson	162	(17)
The Politics of Innocence: Henry James' The American	179	(21)
The Economics of the Body: Kate Chopin's The Awakening	200	(22)
The African-American Voice: William Faulkner's Go Down, Moses	222	(25)
Revivals	247	(6)
Notes	253	(40)
Index	293