New England Literary Culture
From Revolution through Renaissance

This book is a study of the development of New England literature and literary institutions from the American Revolutionary era to the late nineteenth century.

Lawrence Buell (Author)

9780521378017, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 28 April 1989

528 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 2.9 cm, 0.774 kg

This book is a study of the development of New England literature and literary institutions from the American Revolutionary era to the late nineteenth century. Professor Buell explores the foundations, growth and literary results of the professionalization of the writing vocation. He pays particular attention to the major writers - Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Stowe and Dickinson - but surveys them with a number of lesser-known authors, and explores the conventions, values and institutions which affected them all. Some of the main topics covered include the distinctive features of the Early National and Antebellum periods in New England writing; the importance of certain literary genres (poetry, oratory and religious narrative; etc.); the impact of Puritanism and its values; and the invention of acceptable conventions for portraying the New England landscape and institutions in literature.

Part I. Four Overviews: 1. Theoretical premises
2. A narrative overview of New England's literary development
3. Marketplace, ethos, practice: the Antebellum literary situation
4. Neoclassical continuities: the early national era and the New England literary tradition
Part II. Three Representative Genres: 5. New England Poetics: Emerson, Dickinson, and others
6. New England oratory from Everett to Emerson
7. Literary scripturism
Part III. Reinventing Puritanism: the New England Historical Imagination: 8. The concept of puritan ancestry
9. The politics of historiography
10. Fictionalizing puritan history: some problems and approaches
11. Hawthorne and Stowe as rival interpreters of New England Puritanism
Part IV. New England as a Country of the Imagination: The Spirit of Place: 12. The cultural landscape in regional poetry and prose
13. The village as icon
14. Lococentrism from Dwight to Thoreau
15. Comic grotesque
16. Provincial Gothic: Hawthorne, Stoddard, and others
Postscript
Appendix. Vital statistics: a quantitative analysis of authorship as a profession in New England.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: from c 1900 - [DSBH]