In Respect to Egotism: Studies in American Romantic Writing (Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture)
Cambridge University Press, 10/10/1991
EAN 9780521362733, ISBN10: 0521362733
Hardcover, 336 pages, 22.9 x 15.2 x 2.2 cm
Language: English
In this 1991 book, Joel Porte examines 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, 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.
Preface
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Writing, reading, Romanticism
1. 'Where…Is this singular career to terminate?'
Bewildered pilgrims in early American fiction
2. 'Where there is no vision, the people perish…'
Prophets and Pariahs in the Forest of the New World
3. Poe
Romantic centre, critical margin
4. Emerson
experiments in self-creation
5. Hawthorne
'The obscurest man of letters in America'
6. Thoreau's self-perpetuating artefacts
7. Melville
Romantic cock-and-bull
or, the great art of telling the truth
8. Douglass and Stowe
scriptures of the redeemed self
9. Whitman
'Take me as I am or not at all…'
Interchapter
Walt and Emily
10. Dickinson's 'Celestial vail'
snowbound in self-consciousness
Notes
Index.