Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's Evangeline

A Tale of Acadie and the Ambiguous Afterlife of the History of the Acadians

Bibliographic Data

ID8894797
AuthorsMark Niemeyer (0000-0001-7091-536X, Centre Interlangues, corresponding author)
Year2017
Volume48
Issue2
Pages121-145
Publication date2017-04-03
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueCanadian Review of American Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0007-7720 • E-ISSN: 1710-114X
PublisherUniversity of Toronto Press Inc. (UTPress) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.3138/cras.2017.003
OpenAlexW2604169557
LanguageEN
References cited16

Longfellow's Evangeline was hailed as a great and distinctively American work when it appeared in 1847, and the poem's use of North American history was a key element in its favourable reception. This use of history, however, is ambiguous and complex. The epic continues, first of all, in a long tradition of romanticized retellings of the heart-rending story of the Acadians. But the work also engages in a dual-level dialogue with both the mid-eighteenth-century history of the Acadians, who are pitied, without inciting indignation, and the contemporary history of mid-nineteenth-century America, whose expansionism it both implicitly celebrates and criticizes

Afterlife · Ancient history · Art · Chariot · Dual (grammatical number · Element (criminal law · EPIC · Expansionism · History of literature · Indignation · Key (lock · Literature · Poetry · American and British Literature Analysis · Canadian Identity and History · Historical and Literary Studies · History · Law · Philosophy

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