Revisionary Interventions into the Americanist Canon

Front Cover
Donald E. Pease
Duke University Press, 1994 M06 17 - 351 pages
Throughout the era of the Cold War a consensus reigned as to what constituted the great works of American literature. Yet as scholars have increasingly shown, and as this volume unmistakably demonstrates, that consensus was built upon the repression of the voices and historical contexts of subordinated social groups as well as literary works themselves, works both outside and within the traditional canon. This book is an effort to recover those lost voices. Engaging New Historicist, neo-Marxist, poststructuralist, and other literary practices, this volume marks important shifts in the organizing principles and self-understanding of the field of American Studies.
Originally published as a special issue of boundary 2, the essays gathered here discuss writers as diverse as Kate Chopin, Frederick Douglass, Emerson, Melville, W. D. Howells, Henry James, W. E. B. DuBois, and Mark Twain, plus the historical figure John Brown. Two major sections devoted to the theory of romance and to cultural-historical analyses emphasize the political perspective of "New Americanist" literary and cultural study.

Contributors. William E. Cain, Wai-chee Dimock, Howard Horwitz, Gregory S. Jay, Steven Mailloux, John McWilliams, Susan Mizruchi, Donald E. Pease, Ivy Schweitzer, Priscilla Wald, Michael Warner, Robert Weimann

 

Contents

Revisionist Interventions into the Canon
1
The Res Publica of Letters
38
The Desublimation of Romance
69
The Rationale for The American Romance
71
Scarcity Subjectivity and Emerson
83
Hearing Narrative Voices in Melvilles Pierre
100
Eating Books in Late NineteenthCentury America
133
Maternal Discourse and the Romance of SelfPossession in Kate Chopins The Awakening
158
Changing Perspectives in the Work of Mark Twain W
189
The Example of Frederick Douglass
211
Romance and Independents on Mark Twains River
243
Billy Budd Sailor and the Rise of Sociology
272
John Brown and W E B DuBois
305
Contributors
331
Index
333
Copyright

The New Historicist Return of the Repressed Context
187

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