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The American Epic: Transforming a Genre, 1770 1860

The American Epic: Transforming a Genre, 1770 1860

Paperback

Series: Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture, Book 36

Literary CriticismPoetry Criticism

ISBN10: 0521107024
ISBN13: 9780521107020
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: Apr 2 2009
Pages: 296
Weight: 0.96
Height: 0.67 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
This is the first thorough account of the many attempts during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to fashion a distinctly American epic literature from a wide range of potentially heroic New World subjects. McWilliams considers the cultural, political and literary implications of adapting Enlightenment news of republican progress to a genre that had traditionally celebrated the greatness of warriors. He shows how and why the epic in America had to be transformed from imitative narrative poetry into the new genres of prose history (Irving, Prescott, Parkman), fictional romance (Cooper, Melville), and free verse (Whitman).

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McWilliams, John P., Jr.

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Poetry Criticism