Home as Found : Authority and Genealogy in Nineteenth-Century American Literature /

Eric Sundquist takes four representative writers--James Fenimore Cooper, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville--and considers the way in which each grapples with the crucial issues of genealogy and authority in his works. From all four a common pattern emerges: the desire to...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Sundquist, Eric J.
Format: Electronic eBook
Language:English
Published: Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979.
Series:Book collections on Project MUSE.
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Summary:Eric Sundquist takes four representative writers--James Fenimore Cooper, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville--and considers the way in which each grapples with the crucial issues of genealogy and authority in his works. From all four a common pattern emerges: the desire to revolt against the past is countered by the need to invoke or even repeat it. Sundquist's approach to the texts is psychoanalytic, but he does not attempt a clinical dissection of each writer; rather, he determines how personal crisis became material for engaging with larger questions of social and literary crisis.
Item Description:Part of Chapter 1 originally appeared as "Incest and Imitation in Cooper's Home as Found, '' 1977 by The Regents of the University of California, and is reprinted from Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Vol. 32, No. 3, pp. 261-84, by permission of The Regents
Physical Description:1 online resource (238 pages).
ISBN:9781421430157
Access:Open Access