The Complicity of Imagination
The American Renaissance, Contests of Authority, and Seventeenth-Century English Culture

An intertextual 1997 study of nineteenth-century literature and seventeenth-century culture.

Robin Grey (Author)

9780521495387, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 13 April 1997

310 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 2.1 cm, 0.63 kg

"...thoroughly researched, well written, and genuinely compelling...This fascinating study is highly reccomended." Christianity and Literature

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.

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.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: c 1500 to c 1800 [DSBD]