The Sacred Game: Provincialism and Frontier Consciousness in American Literature, 1630-1860Cambridge University Press, 1985 M06 30 - 188 pages 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. |
Contents
Preface page | 1 |
But enmity this amity did break II | 11 |
Brother Jonathan | 27 |
A musy in the thicket | 42 |
Geoffrey Crayon and the gigantic race | 61 |
Hawthornes provincial imagination | 79 |
Working in Eden | 97 |
Life as art in America | 114 |
Other editions - View all
The Sacred Game: Provincialism and Frontier Consciousness in American ... Albert J. von Frank No preview available - 2008 |
Common terms and phrases
abstract Alexis de Tocqueville American artists American culture American literature Anne Bradstreet attenuation behavior Boston Brackenridge Cambridge character circumstances civilized concept conservative Contrast difficulty early eccentric effect England English environment essay Europe European example expression fact failure feel felt frontier consciousness gentleman Greenfield Hill Hawthorne Hawthorne's Henry James Ibid idea ideal identity imagination imitation important intellectual Irving Irving's isolation Jonathan less letter live Longfellow Manly Manly's manners Margaret Fuller meaning modes moral Nathaniel Hawthorne native nature Notebook observed Ohio State University Old World passage past perception perhaps poem poet poetry present problem provincial mind Puritan quaternions Ralph Waldo Emerson relation Royall Tyler Scarlet Letter seems sense simply Sketch-Book social society sort spirit standards story style things thought Timothy Dwight tradition Twice-Told Tales Tyler University Press values vision Washington Irving West western Winthrop words writers York