Correspondence and American Literature, 1770 1865

By Elizabeth Hewitt

Book Overview

Elizabeth Hewitt argues that many canonical American authors, including Jefferson, Emerson, Melville, Dickinson and Whitman, turned to letter-writing as an idealized genre through which to consider the challenges of American democracy before the Civil War. Hewitt maintains that, although correspondence is generally only conceived as a biographical archive, it must instead be understood as a significant genre through which these early authors made sense of social and political relations in the new nation.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0521123739
• ISBN13: 9780521123730
• Release Date: January 2010
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Length: 244 Pages
• Weight: 0.80 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.0" x 9.0"