Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Fenton, Sarah Kathleen

Titel

Rebel angels: American literature across the Civil War

Ort / Verlag

ProQuest Dissertations & Theses

Erscheinungsjahr

2005

Quelle

ProQuest Dissertations & Theses A&I

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• “The Civil War marks an era in the history of the American mind,” Henry James wrote in his little book on Nathaniel Hawthorne, published in 1879. Historians have long followed James's lead and divided the lineage of American writing cleanly in half. This dissertation spans the war and finds something different: continuity where others have found only rupture, a fissure that runs through American history rather than erupting wholesale at war's end. Both before the war and after, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller and Mark Twain embodied a Romantic repudiation of the Enlightenment. They scorned “society” in favor of the unadorned life in communion with nature, and urged their contemporaries to leave their books in the library and head unaccompanied outdoors. By contrast, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Frederick Douglass, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Horatio Alger and Henry James shared a belief that there was no meaningful self to be found outside the social world; that truth was not the exclusive purview of the individual soul but was contingent and socially constructed; that to be free was not to forsake the community but to join it; that bourgeois comforts were to be striven for, not shaken off; and that the past lingered on into the present, no matter however willfully one chose to disregard it. By foregrounding antebellum dissent and following a conversation through the war and after, this dissertation challenges scholarship in which the pre-war period has long looked inexplicably sanguine and the post-war period unaccountably dark. It uncovers a coherent American dialogue instead—one that helped to produce the war and then emerged from it intact.