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  1. Home
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  3. The American Epic
  • Cited by 29
Publisher:
Cambridge University Press
Online publication date:
March 2010
Print publication year:
1989
Online ISBN:
9780511666636
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511666636
Series:
Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture (36)
Subjects:
Literature, Area Studies, American Literature, American Studies, Literary Theory
Information

Book description

John McWilliams's 1990 book was the first thorough account of the many attempts to fashion an epic literature (the anxiously anticipated 'American Epic') from a wide range of potentially heroic New World subjects. At the outset, McWilliams considers the many problems - cultural, political and literary' - of adapting Enlightenment views of republican progress to a genre that had traditionally celebrated the greatness of warriors. After a survey of the many epic poems written during and after the American Revolution, McWilliams shows how and why the epic had to be transformed from imitative narrative poetry into the new, open genres of prose history (Irving, Prescott and Parkman), fictional romance (Cooper and Melville) and free verse (Whitman). Believing that reviews are an important and slighted agent of literary change, McWilliams has written his book in the form of chronological literary history. His book, however, is no march of dates within tired categories. The American Epic suggests that imaginative writers of the Romantic era were in fact far less proscriptive about the boundaries of literary genre than many a twentieth-century writer and scholar.

Reviews

"...an important book that fills a gap in our knowledge and strengthens our understanding of 19th-century literary culture." Choice

"McWilliams surveys the work of Barlow, Dwight, and Trumbull with a sharp eye toward the rhetorical work each must perform introducing his epic to the public, revealing the discomforts each feels in suiting vehicle to message." David S. Shields, The Eighteenth Century

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