The Sacred Game
Provincialism and Frontier Consciousness in American Literature, 1630–1860

This book is a meditation on the theme of provincialism in American literature.

Albert J. von Frank (Author)

9780521301596, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 30 June 1985

200 pages
23.5 x 15.8 x 2.1 cm, 0.42 kg

This book is a meditation on the theme of provincialism in American literature. With careful attention to the historical context, it identifies in the expressions of writers before the Civil War certain qualities of self-doubt and defensiveness, certain perceptions of displacement and decline, so profoundly characteristic as to amount to a defining trait of American literature. As a frontier nation, America lacked an organic culture of its own and embarked on the impossibly difficult task of creating a cultural life from imported forms and ideas. Albert von Frank shows the history of this effort to be one of a desperate conservatism struggling against the withering effects of time and distance on cherished standards of the past.

Preface
Introduction: provincialism and the frontier
1. 'But enmity this amity did break'
2. 'A musy in the thicket'
3. Geoffrey Crayon and the gigantic race
4. Hawthorne's provincial imagination
5. Working in Eden
6. Life as art in Americ
7. Reading God directly: the morbidity of culture
Postscript: tradition and circumstance
Notes
Index.

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