The Cambridge History of American Literature: Volume 2, Prose Writing 1820-1865

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Sacvan Bercovitch, Cyrus R. K. Patell
Cambridge University Press, 1994 - 944 pages
This is the fullest and richest account of the American Renaissance available in any literary history. The narratives in this volume made for a four-fold perspective on literature: social, cultural, intellectual and aesthetic. Michael D. Bell describes the social conditions of the literary vocation that shaped the growth of a professional literature in the United States. Eric Sundquist draws upon broad cultural patterns: his account of the writings of exploration, slavery, and the frontier is an interweaving of disparate voices, outlooks and traditions. Barbara L. Packer's sources come largely from intellectual history: the theological and philosophical controversies that prepared the way for transcendentalism. Jonathan Arac's categories are formalist: he sees the development of antebellum fiction as a dialectic of prose genres, the emergence of a literary mode out of the clash of national, local and personal forms. Together, these four narratives constitute a basic reassessment of American prose-writing between 1820 and 1865. It is an achievement that will remain authoritative for our time and that will set new directions for coming decades in American literary scholarship.
 

Contents

Beginnings of Professionalism I I
11
Womens Fiction and the Literary Marketplace in the 1850s
74
Exploration and Empire
127
The Frontier and American Indians
175
The Literature of Slavery and African American Culture
239
Unitarian Beginnings
331
The Assault on Locke
350
Carlyle and the Beginnings of American Transcendentalism
362
The Hope of Reform
459
Diaspora
495
The Antislavery Years
548
Establishing National Narrative
607
Local Narratives
629
Personal Narratives
661
Literary Narrative
693
Crisis of Literary Narrative and Consolidation
735

Annus Mirabilis
376
The Establishment and the Movement
392
Letters and Social Aims
424
Bibliography
851
Index
861
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About the author (1994)

Sacvan Bercovitch, who is a professor at Harvard University, is probably the most influential critic in American studies today. Tracing the function of rhetoric in American writing from the Puritans through the nineteenth century, Bercovitch has argued that the persuasiveness of rhetoric is in proportion to its capacity to help people act in history. In his books, Bercovitch has revealed the power of American rhetoric as it creates a myth of America that conflates religious and political issues, transforming even the most despairing and critical energies into affirmations of the American way. Among his major arguments is the idea that the rhetoric of America's colonial sermons and histories, founding documents, such as the Declaration of Independence, and novels of the American Renaissance, all participate in the project of transforming what he calls dissensus into rituals of consensus.

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