Omschrijving
This collection maps the significance of fragmentary forms in early American literature and culture from the mid-seventeenth to mid-nineteenth century. The Part and the Whole recovers the distinct aesthetics of the incomplete, retelling the story of American culture by reorienting our collective understanding toward texts and objects that have often been critically ignored.
“Brilliantly shows that respecting the plural, disjunctive, and fragmentary character of much early American writing makes marginalized genres interesting, and permits us to read women, minority writers, and history itself in exciting new ways. Highly recommended!”
“This book bristles with new claims, local insights, and a bona fide enthusiasm of renovation. Its conceptual interventions and its roving, voracious engagement with all kinds of cultural objects will make it a touchstone in the field. I imagine colleagues buying the book, using it in their writing and teaching, and repeatedly skipping and skimming their way through the essays with pleasure.”
“This excellent collection offers a compelling new view of literary textuality in early America... the pieces are well written and reader-friendly. I found myself carried along, learning a great deal about texts and authors that I have long studied and others that I have hardly known. Strong from beginning to end.”
MATTHEW PETHERS is an associate professor of American intellectual and cultural history at the University of Nottingham in the UK. He is the editor of The Edinburgh Companion to Nineteenth-Century American Letters and Letter-Writing and is currently coediting volume two of The Collected Writings of Charles Brockden Brown (Bucknell University Press).
DANIEL DIEZ COUCH is an associate professor of English at the United States Air Force Academy in Colorado, where he teaches eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American literature. He is the author of American Fragments: The Political Aesthetic of Unfinished Forms in the Early Republic.