All the Devils Are Here: American Romanticism and Literary Influence (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9780813951010)

The English literary influence on classic American novelists' depictions of gender, sexuality, and race

With All the Devils Are Here, the literary scholar David Greven makes a signal contribution to the growing list of studies dedicated to tracing threads of literary influence. Herman Melville's, Nathaniel Hawthorne's, and James Fenimore Cooper's uses of Shakespeare and Milton, he finds, reflect not just an intertextual relationship between American Romanticism and the English tradition but also an ongoing engagement with gender and sexual politics.

Greven limns the effect of Shakespeare's Much Ado about Nothing on Hawthorne's exploration of patriarchy, and he shows how misogyny in King Lear informed Melville's evocation of "the step-mother world" of orphaned men in Moby-Dick. Throughout, Greven focuses particularly on male authors' treatment of femininity, arguing that the figure of woman functions for them as a multivalent signifier for artistic expression. Ultimately, Greven demonstrates the ambitions of these writers to comment on the history of the Western tradition and the future of art from their unique positions as Americans.

Author: David Greven
ISBN-10: 0813951011
ISBN-13: 9780813951010
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
Language: English
Published: 04/05/2024
Pages: 324
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 1.43lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.88d