In Respect to Egotism: Studies in American Romantic Writing

Description

In this 1991 book, Joel Porte examines 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, 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.

"...a valuable addition to nineteenth-century American studies...Because of its penetrating and also wide-ranging analysis, this book belongs on the shelf with such other classics about American literature in its formative stages as R.W.B. Lewis's The American Adam (1955), Richard Chase's The American Novel and Its Traditions (1957), Harry Levin's The Power of Blackness (1960), and Leo Mmarx's The Machine in the Garden (1964)." Journal of the Early Republic "Porte's book is a remarkable accomplishment, and should be read by anyone interested in the American 'classics'." American Literature