Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The American Adam: Innocence, Tragedy, and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century

The American Adam: Innocence, Tragedy, and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century

Lewis, R. W. B.

Paperback

Series: Phoenix Books

Literary Criticism

ISBN10: 0226476812
ISBN13: 9780226476810
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: Sep 15 1959
Pages: 208
Weight: 0.50
Height: 0.47 Width: 5.28 Depth: 8.01
Language: English
Intellectual history is viewed in this book as a series of great conversations--dramatic dialogues in which a culture's spokesmen wrestle with the leading questions of their times. In nineteenth-century America the great argument centered about De Crèvecoeur's new man, the American, an innocent Adam in a bright new world dissociating himself from the historic past. Mr. Lewis reveals this vital preoccupation as a pervasive, transforming ingredient of the American mind, illuminating history and theology as well as art, shaping the consciousness of lesser thinkers as fully as it shaped the giants of the age. He traces the Adamic theme in the writings of Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, Henry James, and others, and in an Epilogue he exposes their continuing spirit in the works of F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Ralph Ellison, J. D. Salinger, and Saul Bellow.

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