Revolutionary Writers Literature and Authority in the New Republic, 1725-1810
, by Elliott, EmoryNote: Supplemental materials are not guaranteed with Rental or Used book purchases.
- ISBN: 9780195039955 | 0195039955
- Cover: Paperback
- Copyright: 2/27/1986
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.