Nathaniel Hawthorne as Political Philosopher: Revolutionary Principles Domesticated and Personalized

Democratic Humanism and American Literature illustrates the interplay between democratic assumptions and literaryperformance in the works of America's classic nineteenth-century writers-Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, Cooper,Poe, Whitman, Twain, and James. Harold Kaplan suggests that these major figures' works are linked by the myths of the genesis of a new political culture. Challenged by the democratic ideal, and committed to it, they wrote prophetic books in the American liberal tradition and endowed its ethical intelligence. The new introduction relates the theme of the book to cultural and political developments in the American experience of modernity and adds a discussion of Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams to the figures treated in the original edition. Book jacket.