American Sublime: The Genealogy of a Poetic Genre (Wisconsin Project on American Writers) [Paperback]

Rob Wilson (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 15, 1991 | ISBN-10: 0299127745 | ISBN-13: 978-0299127749

Tracing  ideas of  the sublime in American literature from Puritan writings to the postmodern epoch,  Rob Wilson demonstrates that the North American landscape has been the ground for political as well as aesthetic transport.   He takes a distinctly historical approach and explores the ways in which experiences of the American landscape instill desire for other  kinds of vastness:  self-expansion, national expansion, and American political power.  As Wallace Stevens put it,  the American will takes “dominion everywhere.”
    Wilson  sets the stage for his “genealogy” with a discussion of the classical notion of the sublime (taken primarily from Longinus) and the ways that notion was pragmatically transformed by its American setting and appropriated by American poets.   He follows this transformation in successive chapters on the Puritans (Bradstreet) through the Naturalists (Livingston and Bryant), from the epitome of the American sublime (Whitman) to the greatest of the modernists (Stevens) and its present-day incarnations (Ashbery and others).   Writing today under the sign of Hiroshima, contemporary writers  must struggle with the concept of the sublime within a context of spiralling technologies and nuclear force that calls into question the long-standing American sacralization of power.
    Throughout American Sublime, Wilson engages in an original theoretical inquiry into “the sublime” as term, topic, complex, and controversial idea in literary and critical history.  Furthermore, he undertakes his historical study from an avowedly postmodern perspective, one that draws on and extends the work of Jameson, Lyotard, Foucault, Lentricchia, Harold Bloom, and others.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

• Paperback: 352 pages
• Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press (May 15, 1991)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0299127745
• ISBN-13: 978-0299127749
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,669,421 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An indispensable study of the US will to global power., May 17, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: American Sublime: The Genealogy of a Poetic Genre (Wisconsin Project on American Writers) (Paperback)

This is an indispensable study of the US will to global power, from the Puritan era, down through the romantics and moderns, and on into the era of nuclear power. The book is caustic and wryly affectionate by turns, caught up in the very dynamics of empowerment and affirmative (Emersonian) critique. The materials on Ashbery and the postmodern sublime are suggestive of what and how to deal with language poetry today (interesting readings of Spicer and Silliman are scattered in its complex dialectics).

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The sublime wo't go away,neither will this book., June 15, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: American Sublime: The Genealogy of a Poetic Genre (Wisconsin Project on American Writers) (Hardcover)

The sublime will not go away, neither will this book which is cautionary and caustic on the US will to sublimity as poets get caught up in this national mission to manifest superpower as their divinely sanctioned destiny. A book written inside and against the empire, as it were. Not for the pastoral at heart or liberal in sentiment.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A tough-minded classic of counter-pastoral US poetics., May 11, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: American Sublime: The Genealogy of a Poetic Genre (Wisconsin Project on American Writers) (Paperback)

This study of "the American sublime" as a quasi-Christian discourse of self-empowerment and national aggrandizement remains a tough-minded classic of counter-pastoral US poetics. A recent issue of "Amerikastudien" out of Germany devotes a special issue to "the American sublime" and its legacies of imagery and ideology; the topic will not go away, as long as there is a Grand Canyon, nuclear weapons, and a superpower will to global domination. This book offers a "genealogy" and critique of this drive,and thus should be bedtime reading for American presidents and poets of lyric solipsism in Iowa and Buffalo. Not to be missed!