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The Latest Early American Literature

R. C. De Prospo

The Latest Early American Literature, according to readers for the University of Delaware Press, is “a collection of polemics and manifestoes.” In it R. C. De Prospo bids to follow in the footsteps of the two, rare, early Americanist dissenters whom Philip F. Gura once distinguished as “prophets without honor in the field”: William Spengemann and Michael Colacurcio. The book contends that a supposedly retired nationalist/modernist “telos” continues to reign in most of the latest scholarship, and even more influentially in all of the current literary histories and anthologies, no matter how expansive in gender, ethnic, racial, and “hemispheric” inclusiveness they profess to be. Old teloi, in particular that old American exceptionalist one, can be cunning.

Updating and expanding upon essays written over the past thirty years, De Prospo proposes not only negatively to critique how the latest scholarly receptions of early American literature differ insignificantly from the earlier ones, but positively to propose how a transnationalist concession—that as a neocolonial culture America’s lags behind that of Europe—might advance post-modern historiography by radically repositioning the past as no longer the present’s diachronic predecessor but, to quote Lyotard’s semiotics, its synchronic “differend.” Closer to earth, De Prospo tries at the same time to remain mindful of the pedagogical imperative that ultimately to save the texts of early American literature will require making them legible to average non-specialist, never-to-become specialist undergraduate general education students. To facilitate this he introduces in the concluding section of The Latest Early American Literature what will probably be taken as its most radical intervention: the redefinition of Edgar Allan Poe as an early American writer.

University Press Copublishing Division / University of Delaware Press

Pages: 438 • Trim: 6½ x 9¼

978-1-61149-599-7 • Hardback • January 2016 • $129.00 • (£99.00)

978-1-61149-601-7 • Paperback • September 2017 • $65.99 • (£51.00)

978-1-61149-600-0 • eBook • January 2016 • $62.50 • (£48.00)

Subjects: Literary Criticism / American / General, Literary Criticism / Books & Reading, Literary Criticism / Modern / General

The Latest Early American Literature

Hardback

Paperback

eBook

Summary

The Latest Early American Literature, according to readers for the University of Delaware Press, is “a collection of polemics and manifestoes.” In it R. C. De Prospo bids to follow in the footsteps of the two, rare, early Americanist dissenters whom Philip F. Gura once distinguished as “prophets without honor in the field”: William Spengemann and Michael Colacurcio. The book contends that a supposedly retired nationalist/modernist “telos” continues to reign in most of the latest scholarship, and even more influentially in all of the current literary histories and anthologies, no matter how expansive in gender, ethnic, racial, and “hemispheric” inclusiveness they profess to be. Old teloi, in particular that old American exceptionalist one, can be cunning.

Updating and expanding upon essays written over the past thirty years, De Prospo proposes not only negatively to critique how the latest scholarly receptions of early American literature differ insignificantly from the earlier ones, but positively to propose how a transnationalist concession—that as a neocolonial culture America’s lags behind that of Europe—might advance post-modern historiography by radically repositioning the past as no longer the present’s diachronic predecessor but, to quote Lyotard’s semiotics, its synchronic “differend.” Closer to earth, De Prospo tries at the same time to remain mindful of the pedagogical imperative that ultimately to save the texts of early American literature will require making them legible to average non-specialist, never-to-become specialist undergraduate general education students. To facilitate this he introduces in the concluding section of The Latest Early American Literature what will probably be taken as its most radical intervention: the redefinition of Edgar Allan Poe as an early American writer.

Details

University Press Copublishing Division / University of Delaware Press

Pages: 438 • Trim: 6½ x 9¼

978-1-61149-599-7 • Hardback • January 2016 • $129.00 • (£99.00)

978-1-61149-601-7 • Paperback • September 2017 • $65.99 • (£51.00)

978-1-61149-600-0 • eBook • January 2016 • $62.50 • (£48.00)

Subjects: Literary Criticism / American / General, Literary Criticism / Books & Reading, Literary Criticism / Modern / General

Author

R.C. De Prospo is professor of English at Washington College of Maryland.

Table of Contents

Foreword
I. The Latest Early American Literature
1. The Latest Early American Literature
2. Romancing the Medieval
3. Marginalizing Early American Literature
4. The Tain(e) of/in Spengemann's Mirror

II. Humanizing the Monster
5. Humanizing the Monster
6. Captivity in the Classroom
7. Old Orthodoxy in the New Nation
8. No Notes from Underground: The Subterranean in the Bartrams and Brockden Brown

III. Before/Beyond Multiculturalism
9. Before/Beyond Multiculturalism
10. Marketing Accounts of the Colonial Frontier
11. Paine and Sièyes
12. The Least Possible Nation

IV. E(arly). A(merican). Poe
13. E(arly). A(merican). Poe
14. Poe's Alpha Poem
15. Gide, Poe, Rowlandson
16. Whose/Who's Ligeia?
Afterword
Bibliography
Index
About the Author

The Latest Early American Literature

R. C. De Prospo

The Latest Early American Literature

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