Seers and Judges American Literature as Political Philosophy

by Henderson, Christine Dunn; Davis, Ann; Engeman, Thomas S.; Goren, Lilly J.; Korovessis, Despina; Lawler, Peter Augustine; McNamara, Carol; Nichols, Mary P.; Weiner, Laura

• ISBN13: 9780739103197
• ISBN10: 0739103199
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2001-12-20
• Publisher: Lexington Books

Summary

Alexis de Tocqueville asserted that America had no truly great literature, and that American writers merely mimicked the British and European traditions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This new edited collection masterfully refutes Tocqueville's monocultural myopia and reveals the distinctive role American poetry and prose have played in reflecting and passing judgment upon the core values of American democracy. The essays, profiling the work of Mark Twain, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Updike, Edith Wharton, Walt Whitman, Henry James, Willa Cather, Walker Percy, and Tom Wolfe, reveal how America's greatest writers have acted as society's most ardent cheerleaders and its most penetrating critics. Christine Dunn Henderson's exciting new work offers literature as a portal through which to view the philosophical principles that animate America's political order and the mores which either reinforce or undermine them.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	ix
Introduction	xi
The ``Seer'': The Democratic Poet's Recognition and Transcendence	1	(16)
Ann Davies
Huckleberry Finn and Twain's Democratic Art of Writing	17	(16)
Mary P. Nichols
Tocquevillian Americans: Henry James, Daisy Miller, Pandora Day	33	(16)
Lauren Weiner
The House of Mirth: Edith Wharton's Critique of American Society	49	(24)
Despina Korovessis
Singing an American Song: Tocquevillian Reflections on Willa Cather's The Song of the Lark	73	(14)
Christine Dunn Henderson
A Man of Will	87	(14)
Lilly J. Goren
Percy and Tocqueville on American Aristocracy and Democracy	101	(20)
Peter Augustine Lawler
Men and Money in Tom Wolfe's America	121	(16)
Carol McNamara
The Technological Culture of Nihilism: John Updike's Protestant Pilgrimage and Walker Percy's Catholic Naturalism	137	(22)
Thomas S. Engeman
Index	159	(10)
About the Contributors	169