The Rhetoric of American Romance: Dialectic and Identity in Emerson, and Dickinson, Poe, and HawthorneJohns Hopkins University Press, 1985 - 288 頁 "The formalistic application of the term romance to a species of nineteenth-century narrative fiction fails to do justice to the range and concerns of American romance writers, argues Evan Carton. The Rhetoric of American Romance redefines romance as a self consciously dialectical enactment of critical and philosophic concerns about the relation of words to things and about the nature of the self. For Evan Carton, the distinctive features of the American romance are its rhetorical transgression of generic boundaries, its exploration of the divide--and its fabrication of connections--between the real and the ideal, and its ambivalent attitude toward the powers and limitations of language and imagination. The book demonstrates its theoretical claims through new readings of Emerson, Dickinson, Poe, and Hawthorne that are both independently convincing and mutually supportive. From the works of these four writers, Carton identifies the strategies and structures of romance in four different formal genres. The essays, poems, and stories of Emerson, Dickinson, and Poe exemplify the predicament of romance, which "must imagine the highest reality but which, in doing so, cannot help but see its achievement as merely imaginary, metaphorical, and linguistic." In the novelistic career of Hawthorne (which Carton discusses most extensively), these tensions culminate in The Marble Faun's exploration of the problem of a meaning in world where foundations--conceptual, moral, architectural, aesthetic--have crumbled but where the models they have supported remain powerful. In its paradoxical quest to locate the real by means of imagination and language, the American romance expresses an epistemological dialectic that informs our culture. As a creative mode that highlights the act of interpretation, it suggestively embodies the problem of meaning in contemporary criticism." -- Publisher's description |
內容
Originality and the Self | 25 |
The Terror of Integration the Terror of Detachment | 47 |
The Power of Words ទីង | 78 |
著作權所有 | |
4 個其他區段未顯示
常見字詞
actual ambivalent American romance appears art's artist Blithedale Romance character Chillingworth claims confession consciousness convergence Coverdale Coverdale's creative critical Custom-House death dialectical Dickinson Dimmes Dimmesdale Dimmesdale's divine Donatello double Emerson Emily Dickinson enterprise essay experience expression eyes fact faith fiction final Hawthorne Hawthorne's Hester Hilda Hollingsworth House human identity illusion imagination implication insists integration Joel Porte language legend Ligeia linguistic literary Marble Faun Masquerade material meaning merism mesmeric Mesmeric Revelation metaphor moral narrative narrator narrator's Nathaniel Hawthorne nature novel object once original Oval Portrait paradox paragraph passage past perception phenomenology of Spirit Poe's poem poet portrait possibility present Province-House Puritan Pyncheon quest reader reality relation representation representative reveals Scarlet Letter seeks seems self-conscious self-parodic sense sentence Seven Gables speaker spirit stanza suggests sustain symbol takes tale tale's tension things tion true romance truth ultimate unsettling veil vision Wilson words writes Zenobia