In Respect to Egotism

Joel Porte offers a timely reassessment of nineteenth century literature focusing on the general question of the American Romantic ego and its varying modalities of self-creation self-display self-projection and self-concealment. The book begins by exploring the status of the text in nineteenth-century American writing the relationship of rhetorical reading to historical context and the nature of Romanticism in an American setting. Porte then concentrates on the great authors of the period through a series of thematically linked but critically discrete essays on Brown Irving Parkman Cooper Poe Emerson Hawthorne Thoreau Melville Frederick Douglass Stowe Whitman and Dickinson. Throughout his important new study Porte offers provocative reassessments of familiar texts while at the same time casting an illuminating critical eye on less well-known territory. Readers of this book will come away with increased respect for the achievement of American Romantic writers.