The Romantic Foundations of the American Renaissance / / Leon Chai.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Cornell University Press Archive Pre-2000
• VerfasserIn: Chai, Leon,
• Place / Publishing House: Ithaca, NY : : Cornell University Press, , [2019]; ©1990
• Year of Publication: 2019
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (448 p.)

The Romantic Foundations of the American Renaissance illuminates the process by which the cultural legacy of European Romanticism was assimilated by and transformed in the literature of mid-nineteenth-century America. Leon Chai traces the development various governing concepts or tendencies from their genesis in British, French, and German Romantic traditions through their subsequent appropriation by such American writers as Poe, Emerson, Hawthorne, and Melville. Among the topics he addresses are the shift from allegory to symbolism; selected trends in Romantic science; the secularization of religion; the emergence of a historical consciousness and a philosophy of history; pantheism; the relation of subjectivity to objectivity in Romantic philosophy; and Romantic poets.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Preface -- A Note on the Sources -- Introduction -- PART I. From Allegory to Symbolism -- 1. Poe -- 2. Hawthorne -- 3. Emerson -- 4. Melville -- PART II. The Foundations of Science -- 5. Poe -- 6. Emerson -- 7. Bichat, Balzac, Hawthorne: Vitalism and Mechanism -- PART III. The Secularization of Religion -- 8. Emerson -- 9. Hawthorne -- 10. Melville -- PART IV. The Historical Consciousness -- 11. Emerson: The Philosophy of History -- 12. Hawthorne -- PART V. Pantheism -- 13. Poe: The Divine Energeia -- 14. Emerson: The Divinity of the Self -- 15. Alcott: Of "stages of the spiritual Being" -- 16. Melville -- PART VI. Subjectivity and Objectivity -- 17. Emerson: Toward a Natural History of Intellect -- 18. Margaret Fuller: Woman in the Nineteenth Century -- 19. Hawthorne: The Blithedale Romance -- 20. Melville: Pierre -- PART VII. Poetics -- 21. Poe, Cousin, and Kant: Transformation of a Neoclassical Aesthetic -- 22. Emerson on Classic and Romantic -- 23. Margaret Fuller: Criticism and Consciousness -- 24. Shelley, Goethe, Adam Muller, Melville: The Concept of Tradition -- PART VIII. Epilogue: The Question of Representation -- 25. Shelley -- 26. Stendhal -- 27. Hawthorne -- 28. Melville -- Primary Sources -- Index