In Respect to Egotism: Studies in American Romantic Writing

by Joel Porte

• ISBN13: 9780521110006
• ISBN10: 0521110009
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2009-04-30
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

Joel Porte offers a timely reassessment of nineteenth century literature, focusing on the general question of the American Romantic ego and its varying modalities of self-creation, self-display, self-projection, and self-concealment. The book begins by exploring the status of the "text" in nineteenth-century American writing, the relationship of "rhetorical" reading to historical context, and the nature of "Romanticism" in an American setting. Porte then concentrates on the great authors of the period through a series of thematically linked but critically discrete essays on Brown, Irving, Parkman, Cooper, Poe, Emerson, Hawthorne, Thoreau, Melville, Frederick Douglass, Stowe, Whitman, and Dickinson. Throughout his important new study, Porte offers provocative reassessments of familiar texts while at the same time casting an illuminating critical eye on less well-known territory. Readers of this book will come away with increased respect for the achievement of American Romantic writers.

Table of Contents

Preface

Acknowledgements

Introduction: Writing, reading, Romanticism

'Where...Is this singular career to terminate?': Bewildered pilgrims in early American fiction

'Where there is no vision, the people perish...': Prophets and Pariahs in the Forest of the New World

Poe: Romantic centre, critical margin

Emerson: experiments in self-creation

Hawthorne: 'The obscurest man of letters in America'

Thoreau's self-perpetuating artefacts

Melville: Romantic cock-and-bull; or, the great art of telling the truth

Douglass and Stowe: scriptures of the redeemed self

Whitman: 'Take me as I am or not at all...'; Interchapter: Walt and Emily

Dickinson's 'Celestial vail': snowbound in self-consciousness

Notes

Index

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