Politics and Skepticism in Antebellum American Literature - Couverture rigide

Mastroianni, Dominic

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 110707617X ISBN 13 : 9781107076174

Editeur : Cambridge University Press, 2014

A propos du livre

Présentation de l'éditeur :

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.

Biographie de l'auteur :

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.

À propos de cette édition

• Éditeur: Cambridge University Press
• Date d'édition: 2014
• ISBN 10: 110707617X
• ISBN 13: 9781107076174
• Reliure: Relié
• Nombre de pages: 232