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  1. Home
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  3. Slavery, Philosophy, and American Literature, 1830–1860
Publisher:
Cambridge University Press
Online publication date:
September 2009
Print publication year:
2005
Online ISBN:
9780511485572
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511485572
Series:
Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture (148)
Subjects:
Literature, Area Studies, American Literature, American Studies, Literary Theory
Information

Book description

Examining the literature of slavery and race before the Civil War, Maurice Lee, in this 2005 book, demonstrates how the slavery crisis became a crisis of philosophy that exposed the breakdown of national consensus and the limits of rational authority. Poe, Stowe, Douglass, Melville, and Emerson were among the antebellum authors who tried - and failed - to find rational solutions to the slavery conflict. Unable to mediate the slavery controversy as the nation moved toward war, their writings form an uneasy transition between the confident rationalism of the American Enlightenment and the more skeptical thought of the pragmatists. Lee draws on antebellum moral philosophy, political theory, and metaphysics, bringing a different perspective to the literature of slavery - one that synthesizes cultural studies and intellectual history to argue that romantic, sentimental, and black Atlantic writers all struggled with modernity when facing the slavery crisis.

Reviews

Review of the hardback:'… a thought-provoking attempt to integrate antebellum literature into an American intellectual history from American Enlightenment to postbellum pragmatism.'

Source: Journal of American Studies

Review of the hardback:'The chapters on Poe and Stowe dazzle most … Lee's knowledge of philosophy and literature is broad, deep, and in constant service; his prose ripples with instructive allusions near and far.'

Source: Literature and History

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