Revolutionary Writers: Literature and Authority in the New Republic, 1725-1810

Revolutionary Writers: Literature and Authority in the New Republic, 1725-1810
ISBN-10
0195039955
ISBN-13
9780195039955
Category
Literary Criticism
Pages
337
Language
English
Published
1986
Publisher
Oxford University Press, USA
Author
Emory Elliott

Description

Elliott demonstrates how America's first men of letters--Timothy Dwight, Joel Barlow, Philip Freneau, Hugh Henry Brackenridge, and Charles Brockden Brown--sought to make individual genius in literature express the collective genius of the American people. Without literary precedent to aid them, Elliott argues, these writers attempted to convey a vision of what America ought to be; and when the moral imperatives implicit in their writings were rejected by the vast number of their countrymen they became pioneers of another sort--the first to experience the alienation from mainstream American culture that would become the fate of nearly all serious writers who would follow.

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