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摘要
摘要
Where did American literature start? The familiar story of Emerson and Thoreau has them setting up shop in Concord, Massachusetts, and determining the course of American writing. West of Emerson overhauls this story of origins as it shifts the context for these literary giants from the civilized East to the wide-open spaces of the Louisiana Purchase. Kris Fresonke tracks down the texts by explorers of the far West that informed Nature, Emerson's most famous essay, and proceeds to uncover the parodic Western politics at play in classic New England works of Romanticism. Westerns, this book shows, helped create "Easterns."
West of Emerson roughs up genteel literary history: Fresonke argues for a fresh mix of American literature, one based on the far reaches of American territory and American literary endeavor. Reading into the record the unexplored writings of Lewis and Clark, Zebulon Pike, Stephen Long, and William Emory, Fresonke forges surprising connections between the American West and the American visions emanating from the neighborhood of Walden Pond. These connections open a new view of the politics--and, by way of the notion of "design," the theological lineage--of manifest destiny. Finally, Fresonke's book shows how the cast of the American canon, no less than the direction of American politics, came to depend on what design one placed on the continent.
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The men and women who lived and wrote in the region of early New England are commonly considered the originators of American literature. They were closest in time, space, and psychology to the source of the English mother tongue. They were thoughtful, creative, and self-conscious, and they wrote with stunning power and grace. And they tried to use the mother tongue to create a new literature reflective of the American experience. Fresonke (Adelphi Univ.) asks the reader to broaden the canon of American literature to include the much less studied exploration narratives of Lewis and Clark, Zebulon Pike, Stephen Long, and William Emory as fitting partners with Emerson and Thoreau, in particular. The American experience, after all, was not confined to the narrow band of land between the Atlantic Ocean and the Hudson River. The book is very convincing. The author points out the innumerable echoes and parallels in ideas about destiny, design, nature, and identity that exist between the western writers and the eastern writers. Further, he points out that Thoreau and Emerson valued the western narratives and were avid readers of them. By linking eastern and western writers, Fresonke enriches the understanding of the US's literary past. ^BSumming Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through researchers and faculty. P. J. Ferlazzo Northern Arizona University
目录
List of Illustrations |
Acknowledgments |
Introduction |
1 Natural Causes: The Journals of Lewis and Clark |
2 Zebulon Pike, Federalist Gloom, and Western Lands |
3 The Land without Qualities: Stephen Long and William Emory |
4 Emerson's 1830s |
5 Emerson's Nature: West of Ecstasy |
6 Thoreau and the Design of Dissent |
Epilogue: The Case against the Hamptons |
Notes |
Bibliography |
Index |