Politics and Skepticism in Antebellum American Literature: 169 (Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture, Series Number 169) - Hardcover

Mastroianni, Dominic

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 110707617X ISBN 13: 9781107076174

Verlag: Cambridge University Press, 2014

Inhaltsangabe

This volume explores the way in which antebellum American writers perceived the political implications of modern philosophical skepticism. Dominic Mastroianni offers new readings of six major American authors - Emerson, Melville, Hawthorne, Dickinson, Douglass and Jacobs - and illumines their thinking about revolution, civil war, and the world's susceptibility to transformation.

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Reseña del editor

In confronting their tumultuous time, antebellum American writers often invoked unrevealable secrets. Five of Ralph Waldo Emerson's most inventive interlocutors - Melville, Hawthorne, Dickinson, Douglass, and Jacobs - produced their most riveting political thought in response to Emerson's idea that moods fundamentally shape one's experience of the world, changing only through secret causes that no one fully grasps. In this volume, Dominic Mastroianni frames antebellum and Civil War literature within the history of modern philosophical skepticism, ranging from Descartes and Hume to Levinas and Cavell, arguing that its political significance lies only partially in its most overt engagement with political issues like slavery, revolution, reform, and war. It is when antebellum writing is most philosophical, figurative, and seemingly unworldly that its political engagement is most profound. Mastroianni offers new readings of six major American authors and explores the teeming archive of nineteenth-century print culture.

Biografía del autor

Dominic Mastroianni is an Assistant Professor of English at Clemson University, South Carolina. He is the winner of the 2012 Hennig Cohen Prize, awarded by The Melville Society for the best essay or chapter in Melville studies. He is currently writing a monograph on vulnerability, philosophy, and nineteenth-century American literature.

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Cambridge University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2014
• ISBN 10: 110707617X
• ISBN 13: 9781107076174
• Einband: Tapa dura
• Sprache: Englisch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 250