Home as Found: Authority and Genealogy in Nineteenth-Century American Literature

By Eric J Sundquist

Eric Sundquist takes four representative writers--James Fenimore Cooper, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville--and considers the way in which each grapples with the crucial issues of genealogy and authority in his works. From all four a common pattern emerges: the desire to revolt against the past is countered by the need to invoke or even repeat it. Sundquist's approach to the texts is psychoanalytic, but he does not attempt a clinical dissection of each writer; rather, he determines how personal crisis became material for engaging with larger questions of social and literary crisis.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1421430606
• ISBN13: 9781421430607
• Release Date: December 2019
• Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
• Length: 238 Pages
• Weight: 0.79 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.0" x 9.0"
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher