Home as Found: Authority and Genealogy in Nineteenth-Century American Literature

Sundquist, Eric J.

Home as Found: Authority and Genealogy in Nineteenth-Century American Literature

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Home as Found: Authority and Genealogy in Nineteenth-Century American Literature
Eric J. Sundquist
1979
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Published by: Johns Hopkins University Press
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Eric Sundquist takes four representative writers—James Fenimore Cooper, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville—and considers the way in which each grapples with the crucial issues of genealogy and authority in his works. From all four a common pattern emerges: the desire to revolt against the past is countered by the need to invoke or even repeat it. Sundquist's approach to the texts is psychoanalytic, but he does not attempt a clinical dissection of each writer; rather, he determines how personal crisis became material for engaging with larger questions of social and literary crisis.