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

by Emory Elliott

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780195039955
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	02/27/1986
Pages:	334
Product dimensions:	5.38(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.73(d)

About the Author

University of California, Riverside

Editorial Reviews

"This is a fine book, well organized, well argued, and well written."—Harry S. Mooney, Jr., University of Pittsburgh

"Carefully conceived, gracefully executed, Revolutionary Writers is essential reading for anyone concerned with the literature of the post-revolutionary period, and it is equally important for anyone interested in the ongoing discussion of the origins of the American self."—Early American Literature

"Revolutionary Writers [is] a work that significantly redirects our understanding of American literature in the latter part of the eighteenth and the early nineteenth centuries."—The Canadian Review of American Studies

From the Publisher