Master and use copy. Digital master created according to Benchmark for Faithful Digital Reproductions of Monographs and Serials, Version 1. Digital Library Federation, December 2002
Includes bibliographical references (pages 219-239) and index
In this vigorous challenge to dominant literary criticism, Jerome Loving extends the traditional period of American literary rebirth to the end of the 19th century and argues for the intrinsic value of literature in the face of new historicist and deconstructionist readings. Bucking the trend for revisionist interpretations, Loving discusses the major work of the 19th century's canonized writers as restorative adventures with the self and society. From Irving, Hawthorne, Melville, Poe, Thoreau, and Emerson to Whitman, Twain, Dickinson, James, Chopin, and Dreiser, Loving finds the American liter
Prologue; Acknowledgments; THE AMERICAN RENAISSANCE : PART ONE; 1. living's Paradigm; 2. Hawthorne's Awakening in the Customhouse; 3. Melville's High on the Seas; 4. Poe's Voyage from Edgartown; 5. Emerson's Beautiful Estate; 6. Thoreau's Quarrel with Emerson; THE AMERICAN RENAISSANCE : PART TWO; 7. Whitman's Idea of Women; 8. Twain's Cigar-Store Indians; 9. Dickinson's Unpublished Canon; 10. Henry James's Pearl at a Great Price; 11. Chopin's Twenty-Ninth Bather; 12. Dreiser's Novel About a Nun; Epilogue; Notes; Index
