In this Book
- Lost in the Customhouse: Authorship in the American Renaissance
- Book
- 1993
- Published by: University of Iowa Press
summary
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 literary tradition filled with narrators who keep waking up to the central scene of the author’s real or imagined life. They travel through a customhouse of the imagination in which the Old World experience of the present is taxed by the New World of the utopian past, where life is always cyclical instead of linear and ameliorative.
Loving celebrates, enjoys, and experiences these awakened and reborn writers as he challenges the notion that American literature is preponderately “cultural work.” In the epilogue, he packs up his own carpetbag—the American ego—and passes through the European customhouse to find that American writers are more readily perceived as literary geniuses outside their culture than within it.
Table of Contents
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- Acknowledgments
- pp. xix-xx
- THE AMERICAN RENAISSANCE : PART ONE
- 1. Irvings Paradigm
- pp. 3-18
- 3. Melville's High on the Seas
- pp. 35-52
- 4. Poe's Voyage from Edgartown
- pp. 53-71
- 5. Emerson's Beautiful Estate
- pp. 72-87
- 6. Thoreau's Quarrel with Emerson
- pp. 88-106
- THE AMERICAN RENAISSANCE : PART TWO
- 7. Whitman's Idea of Women
- pp. 109-124
- 8. Twain's Cigar-Store Indians
- pp. 125-140
- 9. Dickinson's Unpublished Canon
- pp. 141-159
- 10. Henry James's Pearl at a Great Price
- pp. 160-176
- 11. Chopin's Twenty-Ninth Bather
- pp. 177-194
- 12. Dreiser's Novel About a Nun
- pp. 195-210
Additional Information
ISBN
9781587291357
Related ISBN(s)
9780877454045, 9780877459224
DOI
MARC Record
OCLC
44963595
Pages
268
Launched on MUSE
2011-07-21
Language
English
Open Access
No
Copyright
1993