Romantic Dialogues

Part 1 of this book examines the English contribution to the 'American Revolution' and the various models of relationship between Britain and America that existed for writers in the 'American Renaissance'. Part 2 considers the politics of James Fenimore Cooper and the inspirational role of the English Romantics in the thinking of Emerson and the art of Bryant Thoreau Hawthorne and Poe Melville Whitman and Dickinson. An epilogue explores how Dickinson and Whitman responded to the seductive music of Alfred Lord Tennyson. How this study is received will say as much about the recovery of serious interest in literary history as about the work's quality. Learned rigorous in testing its assertions mordant and spirited in its expression Romantic Dialogues makes one wonder how one ever read the American text at all without the British context. .... An extraordinary achievement -Robert Weisbuch New England Quarterly