The Reign of Wonder
Naivety and Reality in American Literature

Dr Tanner investigates American literature with regards to wonder and cultivated naivety.

Tony Tanner (Author)

9780521291989, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 2 June 1977

400 pages
21.6 x 14 x 2.3 cm, 0.51 kg

The adopted attitude towards reality and experience in American literature tends to be one of wonder and cultivated naivety rather than analysis and judgement. In this book, Dr Tanner offers some reasons for this and seeks to demonstrate the peculiar importance of wonder in American literature, by examining a number of key writers and showing how they confronted and assimilated reality at the same time he considers some of the difficulties incurred by this approach and studies its effects on American style.

Acknowledgements
Introduction: the sleep of reason
Part I. The Transcendentalists: 1. Saints behold: the transcendentalist point of view
2. Emerson: the unconquered eye and the enchanted circle
3. Thoreau and the sauntering eye
4. Walt Whitman's ecstatic first step
Part II. Mark Twain: 6. The doctors of the wilderness
7. A system of reduction
8. The voice of the outlaw
9. The pond of youth
10. Huck Finn and the reflections of a saphead
Part III. The Twentieth Century: 11. Gertrude Stein and the complete actual present
12. Sherwood Anderson's Little Things
13. Ernest Hemingway's Unhurried Sensations
Part IV. Henry James: 14. The candid outsider
15. The range of wonderment
16. The subjective adventure
Afterword: wonder and alienation - the mystic and the moviegoer
References
Index.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: general [DSB]