At Emerson&39s Tomb The Politics of Classic American Literature [Paperback]

John Carlos Rowe is professor of English at the University of California, Irvine.Representative works are interpreted in light of the two great political movements of the nineteenth century: the abolition of slavery and the women's rights movement. By reexamining Emerson, Poe, Melville, Douglass, Walt Whitman, Chopin, and Faulkner and others, Rowe assesses the degree to which major writers' attitudes toward race, class, and gender contribute to specific political reforms in nineteenth and twentieth-century American culture.Rowe's is a... provocative... important contribution both to literary history's methodology and to understanding the individual writers and the works he examines and discusses in detail.