Format:
1 Online-Ressource (x, 284 pages)
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digital, PDF file(s)
ISBN:
9780511666636
Series Statement:
Cambridge studies in American literature and culture 36
Content:
John McWilliams's 1990 book was the first thorough account of the many attempts to fashion an epic literature (the anxiously anticipated 'American Epic') from a wide range of potentially heroic New World subjects. At the outset, McWilliams considers the many problems - cultural, political and literary' - of adapting Enlightenment views of republican progress to a genre that had traditionally celebrated the greatness of warriors. After a survey of the many epic poems written during and after the American Revolution, McWilliams shows how and why the epic had to be transformed from imitative narrative poetry into the new, open genres of prose history (Irving, Prescott and Parkman), fictional romance (Cooper and Melville) and free verse (Whitman). Believing that reviews are an important and slighted agent of literary change, McWilliams has written his book in the form of chronological literary history. His book, however, is no march of dates within tired categories. The American Epic suggests that imaginative writers of the Romantic era were in fact far less proscriptive about the boundaries of literary genre than many a twentieth-century writer and scholar
Content:
Part I. Imitations: Homer's Tyrannous Eye -- 1. Invocations -- 2. Freedom's Heroes -- 3. Freedom's Fools -- 4. A White Achilles for the West? -- Part II. Transformations: The Epic In New Genres -- 5. Red Achilles, Red Satan -- 6. The Destroying Angel -- 7. Till a Better Epic Comes Along -- 8. "An Epic of Democracy?" -- Prospect
Note:
Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 05 Oct 2015)
Additional Edition:
ISBN 9780521373227
Additional Edition:
ISBN 9780521107020
Additional Edition:
Erscheint auch als Druck-Ausgabe ISBN 9780521373227
Language:
English
DOI:
10.1017/CBO9780511666636
URL:
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