In Respect to Egotism Studies in American Romantic Writing [Hardcover]

This 1991 book examines nineteenth-century literature, focusing on the general question of the American Romantic ego.Throughout this important 1991 study of American Romanticism Professor Porte offers provocative reassessments of familiar and less familiar texts. Throughout this important new study of American Romanticism Professor Porte offers provocative reassessments of familiar and less familiar texts.Throughout this important 1991 study of American Romanticism Professor Porte offers provocative reassessments of familiar and less familiar texts. Throughout this important new study of American Romanticism Professor Porte offers provocative reassessments of familiar and less familiar texts.Joel Porte offers a timely reassessment of nineteenth century literature, focusing on the general question of the American Romantic ego and its varying modalities of self-creation, self-display, self-projection, and self-concealment. The book begins by exploring the status of the text in nineteenth-century American writing, the relationship of rhetorical reading to historical context, and the nature of Romanticism in an American setting. Porte then concentrates on the great authors of the period through a series of thematically linked but critically discrete essays on Brown, Irving, Parkman, Cooper, Poe, Emerson, Hawthorne, Thoreau, Melville, Frederick Douglass, Stowe, Whitman, and Dickinson. Throughout his important new study, Porte offers provocative reassessments of familiar texts while at the same time casting an illuminating critical eye on less well-known territory. Readers of this book will come away with increased respect for the achievement of American Romantic writers.Preface; Acknowledgements; Introduction: Writing, reading, Romanticism; 1. 'Where&Is this singular career to terminate?': Bewildered pilgrims in early American fiction; 2. 'Where there is no vision, the people perish&': Prophets and Pariahs in the Forest of the New World; 3. Poe: Romantic cel'