Product Description: Addressing vital issues in the current revision of American literary studies, Olaf Hansen carries out an exposition of American writing as a philosophical tradition. His broad and comparative view of American culture reveals the importance of the American allegory as a genuine artistic and intellectual style and as a distinct mode of thought particularly suited to express the philosophical legacy of transcendentalism...read more

This subtle intellectual biography juxtaposes Ralph Waldo Emerson's revolutionary spiritual thinking with his elitist ideas of race and property--a contrast so sharp as to make his personality seem almost incoherent." Writing in (he great modern tradition of French anglicisles, Maurice Gonnaud compares Emerson's taste for solitude and the lyric ardor it awakened in him to his efforts to confront the social pressures of his times. Originally published in 1987. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Product Description: Beginning in the 1790s, North American readers developed an appetite for the gothic novel, as imported, reprinted, and pirated editions of British and European romances flooded the market alongside homegrown works. In Gothic Subjects, Siân Silyn Roberts accounts for the sudden and considerable appeal of the gothic during this period by contending that it prepared a culturally diverse American readership to think of itself as part of a transatlantic world through which goods, people, and information could circulate...read more

Product Description: Providing a provocative and original perspective on Shakespeare, Peter Holbrook argues that Shakespeare is an author friendly to such essentially modern and unruly notions as individuality, freedom, self-realization and authenticity...read more

Product Description: Explores how Walter Pater and his contemporary aesthetes were influenced by modern philosophies. Repositioning Walter Pater at the philosophical nexus of Aestheticism, this study presents the first discussion of how Pater redefines Romantic Individualism through his engagements with modern philosophical discourses and in the context of emerging modernity in Britain...read more

Mikhail Lermontov (1814-1841) is one of Russia's most prominent poets--and one of its most puzzling. In this radically new interpretation, David Powelstock reveals how the seeming contradictions in Lermontov's life and works can be understood as manifestations of a coherent worldview. By bringing to light Lermontov's operative version of Romantic individualism, Powelstock is able to make sense of the poet's relationship to "romantic irony," his highly modern concept of the reader (both real, and implied in the text), and his vexed passion for his predecessor Alexander Pushkin--a relationship that is almost always treated sentimentally, but is here given its true competitive edge. Furthermore, Powelstock offers the most persuasive account ever given of Lermontov's exceptionally odd treatment of, and success with, women--both in real life and in fiction--and of his cruel overlapping of these two planes. Clarifying what has remained perplexing for so long, and correcting what has been misinterpreted, Powelstock's work illuminates Lermontov's views of dignity, death, love, nature, society, and ethics--and, finally, gives us an intellectual biography that is deeper and more subtle than any written before.

Product Description: Horizons of Enchantment is about the peculiar power and exceptional pull of the imaginary in American culture. Johannessen’s subject here is the almost mystical American belief in the promise and potential of the individual, or the reliance on a kind of “modern magic” that can loosely be characterized as a fundamental and unwavering faith in the secular sanctity of the American project of modernity...read more

Product Description: Individualism: The Cultural Logic of Modernity explores ideas of the modern sovereign individual in the western cultural tradition. Divided into two sections, this volume surveys the history of western individualism in both its early and later forms: chiefly from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, and then individualism in the twentieth century...read more

This study analyzes the power, allure, and consequences of radical individualism and the kind of cultural critique it generates in the major figure of American Romanticism, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and the central figure of American modernism, Ezra Pound. Both writers set out to criticize and heal the dissociation of ethics, economics, and politics that they saw as the alienating cultural consequence of capitalism. But because their vision of the inalienable individual was modeled on the structure and logic of private property, they reproduced the very contradictions and alienations that they set out to critique and overcome in their ambitious cultural projects.

Product Description: Beyond their status as classic children’s stories, Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books play a significant role in American culture that most people cannot begin to appreciate. Millions of children have sampled the books in school; played out the roles of Laura and Mary; or visited Wilder homesites with their parents, who may be fans themselves...read more

Product Description: Traber reexamines the practice of self-marginalization in Euro-American literature and popular culture that depict whites adopting varied markers of otherness to disengage from the dominant culture. He draws on critical theory, whiteness and cultural studies to counter an eager correlation between marginality and agency...read more

Product Description: Early eighteenth-century serious drama often addresses the significance of liberty. This study focuses on the theme of civic and individual liberty in the little known tragedies of James Thomson, Sophonisba, Agamemnon and Tancred and Sigismunda, all of which problematise the condition of liberty under the influence of ideology...read more

Product Description: This book explores the relationships between visual culture, social theory and the individual. Visual culture has emerged as a central area of debate and research in contemporary sociology, yet the field is still underdefined. In particular, the relationship between visual culture and the individual remains obscure...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Named an "Outstanding Academic Book" by "Choice" magazine, "The Ordeal of Robert Frost" depicts Frost as a thoroughly contemporary poet, dynamically engaged - in his own way - with the developments of literary modernism and American cultural criticism and with the social and political issues of his time...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: The first, full-length analysis of Ayn Rand's most widely-read work. (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: In Myths of Modern Individualism, the renowned critic Ian Watt treats Don Juan, Don Quixote, Faust, and Robinson Crusoe as "individualists," pursuing their own views of what they should be. The original Counter Reformation myths saw the individualism of Don Juan, Don Quixote, and Faust as a problem to be quelled by death or mockery...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Only recently has Oscar Wilde been perceived as a writer of tremendous sophistication and depth. Jody Price now contributes to the exciting new work being done on Wilde. She establishes a place for him as a determined social activist, who, throughout his literary life, was attempting to define a theory for social change that would create a society free of intolerance and inequality...read more

Drawing on the work of Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, John Dewey, and Henry James, an essay on individualism discusses how these famous 'individualists' responded to the economic realities of capitalism. By the author of The American Henry James.

Product Description: This ambitious book attempts to rehistoricize the Golden Age of Spain (ca. 1550-1680) by placing literary production in its socio-cultural context. Drawing on theories of cultural materialism and making use of historical analysis, George Mariscal focuses on the ways in which the problem of subjectivity is constructed in the writing of the period, particularly the poetry of Francisco de Quevedo and Cervantes' Don Quixote...read more