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At Emerson's Tomb

The Politics of Classic American Literature

John Carlos Rowe author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Columbia University Press

Published:20th Feb '97

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At Emerson's Tomb cover

Challenges the conventional critical reading of the American poetic project as an engagement with or reaction against Emersonian thought. Rowe demonstrates how ideals of individualism, intellectualism, and otherworldiness inevitably undermine any political effectiveness that a writer may seek to achieve.

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.

Rowe's is a... provocative... important contribution both to literary history's methodology and to understanding the individual writers and the works he examines and discusses in detail. Choice

ISBN: 9780231058957

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: unknown

318 pages