The complicity of imagination : the American Renaissance, contests of authority, and seventeenth-century English culture

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The complicity of imagination : the American Renaissance, contests of authority, and seventeenth-century English culture

Robin Grey

(Cambridge studies in American literature and culture, 106)

Cambridge University Press, 1997

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Includes bibliographical references and index

Description and Table of Contents

Description

The Complicity of Imagination examines the rich and complex relationship between four nineteenth-century authors and the culture and politics of seventeenth-century England. Challenging the notion that antebellum Americans were burdened by a sense of cultural inferiority in both their thought and their writing, this 1997 study portrays an American Renaissance whose writers were deeply enough read in the literature and controversies of seventeenth-century England to appropriate its cultural artifacts for their own purposes. By exploring the broader cultural implications of intertextual relationships, this book demonstrates how literary texts participate in the artistic, political and theological tensions within American culture.

Table of Contents

  • 1. Cultural predicaments and authorial responses
  • 2. A Seraph's Eloquence: Emerson's inspired language and Milton's apocalyptic prose
  • 3. Margaret Fuller's The Two Herberts: Emerson and the disavowal of sequestered virtue
  • 4. As If a Green Bough were Laid Across the Page: Thoreau's seventeenth-century landscapes and extravagant personae
  • 5. Melville's Mardi and Moby-Dick: marvelous travel narratives, and seventeenth-century methods of inquiry
  • 6. Surmising the infidel: Melville reads Milton.

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