This book is a meditation on the theme of provincialism in American literature. With careful attention to the historical context, it identifies in the expressions of writers before the Civil War certain qualities of self-doubt and defensiveness, certain perceptions of displacement and decline, so profoundly characteristic as to amount to a defining trait of American literature. As a frontier nation, America lacked an organic culture of its own and embarked on the impossibly difficult task of creating a cultural life from imported forms and ideas. Albert von Frank shows the history of this effort to be one of a desperate conservatism struggling against the withering effects of time and distance on cherished standards of the past.
Before 1854, most Northerners managed to ignore the distant unpleasantness of slavery. But that year an escaped Virginia slave, Anthony Burns, was captured and brought to trial in Boston--and never ag
This book is a meditation on the theme of provincialism in American literature. With careful attention to the historical context, it identifies in the expressions of writers before the Civil War certain qualities of self-doubt and defensiveness, certain perceptions of displacement and decline, so profoundly characteristic as to amount to a defining trait of American literature. As a frontier nation, America lacked an organic culture of its own and embarked on the impossibly difficult task of creating a cultural life from imported forms and ideas. Albert von Frank shows the history of this effort to be one of a desperate conservatism struggling against the withering effects of time and distance on cherished standards of the past.
This inaugural volume of a four-volume set marks the beginning of the publication of all 180 of the extant sermons composed and delivered by Emerson between the start of his ministerial career in 182
Ralph Waldo Emerson: The Major Poetry, like its companion prose volume, presents a selection of definitively edited texts drawn chiefly from the multivolumeCollected Works. Accompanying each poem is a
At the time of his death in 1882, Ralph Waldo Emerson was counted among the greatest poets in nineteenth-century America. This variorum edition of all the poems published during his lifetime offers th
