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9780813951027 Academic Inspection Copy

All the Devils Are Here

American Romanticism and Literary Influence
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The English literary influence on classic American novelists' depictions of gender, sexuality, and race With All the Devils Are Here, the literary scholar David Greven makes a signal contribution to the growing list of studies dedicated to tracing threads of literary influence. Herman Melville's, Nathaniel Hawthorne's, and James Fenimore Cooper's uses of Shakespeare and Milton, he finds, reflect not just an intertextual relationship between American Romanticism and the English tradition but also an ongoing engagement with gender and sexual politics. Greven limns the effect of Shakespeare's Much Ado about Nothing on Hawthorne's exploration of patriarchy, and he shows how misogyny in King Lear informed Melville's evocation of "the step-mother world" of orphaned men in Moby-Dick. Throughout, Greven focuses particularly on male authors' treatment of femininity, arguing that the figure of woman functions for them as a multivalent signifier for artistic expression. Ultimately, Greven demonstrates the ambitions of these writers to comment on the history of the Western tradition and the future of art from their unique positions as Americans.
David Greven is Professor of English at the University of South Carolina and the author of The Fragility of Manhood: Hawthorne, Freud, and the Politics of Gender.
Tracing lines of influence in texts while at the same time broadening perspectives on those texts, as Greven's book demonstrates, bears important fruit. This study, then, achieves what it advocates and renews the value of an approach for our times.-- "Revue francaise d'etudes americaines" An engaging, theoretically sophisticated book. . . Ultimately, this monograph should appeal to scholars of intertextuality, transatlantic studies, queer and gender studies, nineteenth-century American literary studies, and especially the works of Hawthorne and Melville. It is a book whose individual textual readings well reward the time spent with them.-- "Nineteenth-Century Contexts"
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