The Limits of American Literary Ideology in Pound and Emerson

Cary Wolfe analyses the dynamics and consequences of radical individualism and the sort of cultural critique it generates in Ralph Waldo Emerson and Ezra Pound.

Cary Wolfe (Author)

9780521445559, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 28 January 1994

308 pages
23.7 x 16 x 2.1 cm, 0.545 kg

"The Limits of American Literary Ideology joins with a handful of other recent studies in seeking to change the kinds of questions scholars and critics put to Pound. In so doing it helps make the poet available to new audiences and to the important concerns of the next century." Michael Coyle, Paideuma

In The Limits of American Literary Ideology in Pound and Emerson, Cary Wolfe analyses the dynamics and consequences of radical individualism and the sort of cultural critique it generates in Ralph Waldo Emerson and Ezra Pound. The main purpose of the book is to demonstrate that any form of individualism that is modelled on the logic and structure of private property will always reproduce the very contradictions and alienations that it set out to criticise and to remedy. Part of what makes this study unique and important is that it uses the ideology of individualism, still so powerful and seductive in contemporary America, to build a bridge between the two major figures from literary periods – Modernism and American Romanticism – which are often seen in stark opposition. In doing so, this study extends the critical paradigms and techniques of one of the most exciting new fields of cultural criticism (the so-called 'New Americanist' criticism) to cover a period (Modernism) and a type of writing (poetry) that it has largely ignored.

Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. A politics of difference
2. Critiques of capitalist (literary) production
3. Economies of individualism
4. 'Gynocracy' and 'red blood'
5. Visionary capital
6. Ideologies of the organic
7. Signs that bind: ideology and form in Pound's poetics
Notes
Index.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: from c 1900 - [DSBH], Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900 [DSBF]