Slavery, Philosophy, and American Literature, 1830–1860

Lee demonstrates how Melville, Emerson and others tried to find rational solutions to the slavery conflict.

Maurice S. Lee (Author)

9780521152686, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 26 August 2010

232 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.3 cm, 0.35 kg

Review of the hardback: 'The chapters on Poe and Stowe dazzle most … Lee's knowledge of philosophy and literature is broad, deep, and in constant service; his prose ripples with instructive allusions near and far.' Literature and History

Examining the literature of slavery and race before the Civil War, Maurice Lee, in this 2005 book, demonstrates how the slavery crisis became a crisis of philosophy that exposed the breakdown of national consensus and the limits of rational authority. Poe, Stowe, Douglass, Melville, and Emerson were among the antebellum authors who tried - and failed - to find rational solutions to the slavery conflict. Unable to mediate the slavery controversy as the nation moved toward war, their writings form an uneasy transition between the confident rationalism of the American Enlightenment and the more skeptical thought of the pragmatists. Lee draws on antebellum moral philosophy, political theory, and metaphysics, bringing a different perspective to the literature of slavery - one that synthesizes cultural studies and intellectual history to argue that romantic, sentimental, and black Atlantic writers all struggled with modernity when facing the slavery crisis.

Acknowledgements
Introduction
1. Absolute Poe
2. 'Lord, it's so hard to be good': affect and agency in Stowe
3. Taking care of the philosophy: Douglass's common sense
4. Melville and the state of war
5. Toward a transcendental politics: Emerson's second thoughts
Epilogue: an unfinished and not unhappy ending
Index.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: general [DSB]