1st Edition

The Literary Quest for an American National Character

By Finn Pollard Copyright 2009
272 Pages
by Routledge

272 Pages
by Routledge

272 Pages
by Routledge

"What then is the American, this new man?" This question is explored here through the lives and writings of a sequence of imaginative authors each of whom confronted a crucial moment in the evolution of the new nation (from Crevecoeur and the Revolution, through Washington Irving and Jeffersonian Democracy, to James Fenimore Cooper and the Era of Good Feelings). At the centre of these... Read more

Introduction

1 – A Farmer asks a Question and a Scientist creates a Model (c.1760-1776)

2 – Hugh Henry Brackenridge and the Dogma of Balance

3 – The Defining Moment: Washington Irving and A History of New York

4 – The Fragments: Minor Writers (c.1810-1824)

5 – The Illusion Ascendant: James Fenimore Cooper and the Art of Reconciliation

Conclusion: A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Biography

Finn Pollard is a historian of the literature and politics of revolutionary and early national United States. He is a graduate of the University of Edinburgh and has held lectureships at the universities of Glasgow and Newcastle.