Conspiracy and Romance by Robert S Levine
Robert Levine has examined the American romance in a historical context. His book offers a fresh reading of the genre, establishing its importance to American culture between the founding of the republic and the Civil war. With convincing historical and literary detail, Levine shows that anxieties about various subversive elements - French revolutionaries, secret societies, Catholic immigrants, African slaves - are central to the fictional worlds of Brockden Brown, Cooper, Hawthorne and Melville. Ormond, The Bravo, The Blithedale Romance, and Benito Cereno are persuasively explicated by Levine to demonstrate that the romance addressed many of the same conflicts and ideals that gave rise to the American republic. Americans conceived of America as a romance, and their romances dramatised the historical conditions of the culture, The fear that conspiracies would subvert the order and integrity of the new nation were recurrent and widespread; Levine makes us see that these fears informed the works of our major romance writers from the turn of the century until the Civil War.-
Salem Story
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Fictions of Capital
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Harriet Jacobs and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
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Reimagining Thoreau
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Sound Recording Technology and American Literature
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Worlds of Hurt
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A Grand Army of Black Men
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Pocahontas
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T. S. Eliot and Ideology
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Wallace Stevens
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Tragedy, Affect and Labor in American Literature, 1945–2020
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Scenes of Nature, Signs of Men
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Complicity and the Antebellum Moral Imagination
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The Harlem Renaissance Weekly
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American Narrative Realism
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The Psychopath and the Twentieth-Century American Novel
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Energy and Economy in American Literature
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American Literature and Immediacy
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Hobbes, Sovereignty, and Early American Literature
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Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry, 1908–1934
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Cross-Cultural Reckonings
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A Natural History of Pragmatism
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Oliver Wendell Holmes and the Culture of Conversation
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The Logic of Slavery
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Race, Slavery, and Liberalism in Nineteenth-Century American Literature
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The Cultural Geography of Colonial American Literatures
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Henry James' Last Romance
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Landscape and Ideology in American Renaissance Literature
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Multilingual America
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Race, American Literature and Transnational Modernisms
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The Complicity of Imagination
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Failure and the American Writer
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The Place of Fiction in the Time of Science
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Politics and Skepticism in Antebellum American Literature
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Henry James and the Writing of Race and Nation
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Postapocalyptic Fantasies in Antebellum American Literature
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Time, Tense, and American Literature
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A House Undivided
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Voices of Persuasion
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In Respect to Egotism
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Fictions of Mass Democracy in Nineteenth-Century America
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Covenant and Republic
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Race, Work, and Desire in American Literature, 1860–1930
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Discrepant Engagement
"..all readers interested in the American novel will find his study provocative and frequently insightful." Michael Oriard, Studies in the Novel
"...richly interdisciplinary in its scholarship and the most committed to detailing precise ways that...American romancers have been very anxiously and actively responsive to their society." ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance
"Levine does an excellent job of situating the works he examines in particular ideological frameworks...Levine's analysis of the ways in which themes transfer across discourse communities suggests some useful directions for rethinking the relation of the traditional American literary canon to the cultural situation that gave rise to its texts." Journal of American History
"Levine provides useful information on the Illuminati scare and the counter-subversive discourse of the 1790's....Levine's persuasive analysis provides an example of how historical scholarship can significantly change one's reading of an individual text while also allowing that text to inform one's perception of its original audience." Scott Peeples, The Eighteenth Century
"...richly interdisciplinary in its scholarship and the most committed to detailing precise ways that...American romancers have been very anxiously and actively responsive to their society." ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance
"Levine does an excellent job of situating the works he examines in particular ideological frameworks...Levine's analysis of the ways in which themes transfer across discourse communities suggests some useful directions for rethinking the relation of the traditional American literary canon to the cultural situation that gave rise to its texts." Journal of American History
"Levine provides useful information on the Illuminati scare and the counter-subversive discourse of the 1790's....Levine's persuasive analysis provides an example of how historical scholarship can significantly change one's reading of an individual text while also allowing that text to inform one's perception of its original audience." Scott Peeples, The Eighteenth Century
Levine is an English professor at the University of Maryland and the author or editor of eleven publications, including Martin Delany, Frederick Douglass, and the Politics of Representative Identification (both from the University of North Carolina Press) and Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel Dred (both from the University of North Carolina Press).
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9780521366540 |
| ISBN 10 | 0521366542 |
| Title | Conspiracy and Romance |
| Author | Robert S Levine |
| Series | Cambridge Studies In American Literature And Culture |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Hardback |
| Publisher | Cambridge University Press |
| Year published | 1989-09-29 |
| Number of pages | 316 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |