American Romanticism and the Marketplace

Bibliographic Data

ID9589486
AuthorsWilliam H Shurr, Michael T Gilmore (University of Chicago)
Year1986
Volume58
Issue2
Pages282
Publication date1986-05-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueAmerican Literature (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0002-9831 • E-ISSN: 1527-2117
PublisherJSTOR (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.2307/2925826
OpenAlexW3141289663
LanguageEN
Citations received19

This book can take its place on the shelf beside Henry Nash Smith's Virgin Land Leo Marx's Machine in the Garden.-Choice [Gilmore] demonstrates the profound, sustained, engagement with society embodied in the works of Emerson, Hawthorne, Thoreau Melville. In effect, he relocates the Renaissance where it properly belongs, at the centre of a broad social, economic, ideological movement from the Jacksonian era to the Civil War. Basically, Gilmore's argument concerns the writers' participation in what Thoreau called 'the curse of trade.' He details their mixed resistance to complicity in the burgeoning literary marketplace and, by extension, the entire ' economic revolution' which between 1830 1860 'transformed the United States into a market society'. . . . result is a model of literary-historical revisionism. Gilmore's opening chapters on Emerson Thoreau show that 'transcendental' thought language can come fully alive when understood within the material processes ideological constraints of their time. . . . The remaining five chapters, on Hawthorne Melville, contain some of the most penetrating recent commentaries on the aesthetic strategies of Romantic fiction, presented within and through some of the most astute, thoughtful considerations I know of commodification the 'democratic public' in mid-nineteenth-century America. . . . Practically methodologically, American Romanticism the Marketplace has a significant place in the movement towards a new literary history. It places at the forefront of a new generation of critics who are not just reinterpreting familiar texts or discovering new texts to interpret, but reshaping our ways of thinking about literature culture.-Sacvan Bercovitch, Times Literary Supplement Gilmore writes with energy, clarity, wit. The reader is enriched by this book. William H. Shurr, American Literature

Aesthetics · Art · Art history · Romanticism · American Environmental and Regional History · American Literature and Culture · History

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