Revolutionary Writers: Literature and Authority in the New Republic, 1725-1810

By Emory Elliott

Book Overview

Elliott demonstrates how America's first men of letters--Timothy Dwight, Joel Barlow, Philip Freneau, Hugh Henry Brackenridge, and Charles Brockden Brown--sought to make individual genius in literature express the collective genius of the American people. Without literary precedent to aid them, Elliott argues, these writers attempted to convey a vision of what America ought to be; and when the moral imperatives implicit in their writings were rejected by the vast number of their countrymen they became pioneers of another sort--the first to experience the alienation from mainstream American culture that would become the fate of nearly all serious writers who would follow.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0195039955
• ISBN13: 9780195039955
• Release Date: February 1986
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Length: 334 Pages
• Weight: 0.94 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.5" x 8.4"

Customer Reviews

A very important study

This is a very important study of early American writing and should be sought out by anyone interested in the formation of American political and religious rhetoric.