Robert Levine examines the American romance in a new historical context. His book offers a fresh reading of the genre, establishing its importance to American culture between the founding of the Republic and the Civil War. With convincing historical and literary detail, Levine shows that anxieties about foreign elements--French revolutionaries, secret societies, Catholic immigrants, African slaves--are central to the fictional worlds of Brockden Brown, Cooper, Hawthorne and Melville. Ormond, The Bravo, The Blithedale Romance, and Benito Cereno are persuasively explicated by Levine to demonstrate that the romance dramatized the same conflicts and ideals that gave rise to the American Republic. Americans conceived "America" as a historical romance, and their romances dramatize the historical conditions of the culture. The fear that reputed conspiracies would subvert the order and integrity of the new nation were recurrent and widespread; Levine illuminates the influence of such fears on the works of major romance writers during this period.
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Editorial Reviews
Review
"...all readers interested in the American novel will find his study provocative and frequently insightful." Michael Oriard, Studies in the Novel
"...richly interdisciplinary in its scholarship and the most committed to detailing precise ways that...American romancers have been very anxiously and actively responsive to their society." ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance
"Levine does an excellent job of situating the works he examines in particular ideological frameworks...Levine's analysis of the ways in which themes transfer across discourse communities suggests some useful directions for rethinking the relation of the traditional American literary canon to the cultural situation that gave rise to its texts." Journal of American History
"Levine provides useful information on the Illuminati scare and the counter-subversive discourse of the 1790's....Levine's persuasive analysis provides an example of how historical scholarship can significantly change one's reading of an individual text while also allowing that text to inform one's perception of its original audience." Scott Peeples, The Eighteenth Century
"...richly interdisciplinary in its scholarship and the most committed to detailing precise ways that...American romancers have been very anxiously and actively responsive to their society." ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance
"Levine does an excellent job of situating the works he examines in particular ideological frameworks...Levine's analysis of the ways in which themes transfer across discourse communities suggests some useful directions for rethinking the relation of the traditional American literary canon to the cultural situation that gave rise to its texts." Journal of American History
"Levine provides useful information on the Illuminati scare and the counter-subversive discourse of the 1790's....Levine's persuasive analysis provides an example of how historical scholarship can significantly change one's reading of an individual text while also allowing that text to inform one's perception of its original audience." Scott Peeples, The Eighteenth Century
Book Description
Robert Levine has examined the American romance in a historical context. His book offers a fresh reading of the genre, establishing its importance to American culture between the founding of the republic and the Civil war. With convincing historical and literary detail, Levine shows that anxieties about various subversive elements are central to the fictional worlds of Brockden Brown, Cooper, Hawthorne and Melville.
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Front Cover | Front Flap | Table of Contents | First Pages | Index | Back Flap | Back Cover | Surprise Me!
Inside This Book
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First Sentence:
Charles Brockden Brown's novels abound with mysterious villains who for a variety of reasons have fled Europe and emigrated to America. Read the first page Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
Benito Cereno, White Jacket, Brook Farm, San Dominick, Don Camillo, New England, French Revolution, Roman Catholic, Brockden Brown, New York, Red Cross, Gray Champion, United States, Captain Delano, Fenimore Cooper, The Marble Faun, Nat Turner, The Scarlet Letter, Free Masons, The Gentle Boy, Billy Budd, The American Democrat, Bell's Biography, Captain Claret, Moby Dick New!
Concordance | Text Stats Browse Sample Pages:
Front Cover | Front Flap | Table of Contents | First Pages | Index | Back Flap | Back Cover | Surprise Me!
Charles Brockden Brown's novels abound with mysterious villains who for a variety of reasons have fled Europe and emigrated to America. Read the first page Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
Benito Cereno, White Jacket, Brook Farm, San Dominick, Don Camillo, New England, French Revolution, Roman Catholic, Brockden Brown, New York, Red Cross, Gray Champion, United States, Captain Delano, Fenimore Cooper, The Marble Faun, Nat Turner, The Scarlet Letter, Free Masons, The Gentle Boy, Billy Budd, The American Democrat, Bell's Biography, Captain Claret, Moby Dick New!
Concordance | Text Stats Browse Sample Pages:
Front Cover | Front Flap | Table of Contents | First Pages | Index | Back Flap | Back Cover | Surprise Me!
Citations (learn more)
This book cites 227
books:
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66
books
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- Gleanings in Europe by James Fenimore Cooper on 5 pages
- Notions of the Americans: Picked Up by a Travelling Bachelor (Writings of James Fenimore Cooper) by James Fenimore Cooper on 4 pages
- Of Plymouth Plantation: 1620-1647 by William Bradford on 4 pages
- Development of American Romance: The Sacrifice of Relation by Michael Davitt Bell on 4 pages
- The American Historical Romance (Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture) by George Dekker on 4 pages
See all 227 books this book cites
- The Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville (Cambridge Companions to Literature) by Robert S. Levine in Front Matter (1), Front Matter (2), and Back Matter
- The Literature of Labor and the Labors of Literature: Allegory in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction (Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture) by Cindy Weinstein in Back Matter (1), and Back Matter (2)
- Reading the Text That Isn't There: Paranoia in the Nineteenth-Century Novel (Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory) by Mike Davis in Back Matter (1), and Back Matter (2)
- The Cambridge Companion to Nathaniel Hawthorne (Cambridge Companions to Literature) by Richard H. Millington on page 206, and Back Matter
- Melville's City: Literary and Urban Form in Nineteenth-Century New York (Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture) by Wyn Kelley in Back Matter (1), and Back Matter (2)
See all 66 books citing this book
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