Politics and Skepticism in Antebellum American Literature [Paperback]

This volume explores the way in which antebellum American writers perceived the political implications of modern philosophical skepticism.This volume explores the way in which antebellum American writers perceived the political implications of modern philosophical skepticism. Dominic Mastroianni offers new readings of six major American authors - Emerson, Melville, Hawthorne, Dickinson, Douglass and Jacobs - and illumines their thinking about revolution, civil war, and the worlds susceptibility to transformation.This volume explores the way in which antebellum American writers perceived the political implications of modern philosophical skepticism. Dominic Mastroianni offers new readings of six major American authors - Emerson, Melville, Hawthorne, Dickinson, Douglass and Jacobs - and illumines their thinking about revolution, civil war, and the worlds susceptibility to transformation.In confronting their tumultuous time, antebellum American writers often invoked unrevealable secrets. Five of Ralph Waldo Emersons most inventive interlocutors - Melville, Hawthorne, Dickinson, Douglass, and Jacobs - produced their most riveting political thought in response to Emersons idea that moods fundamentally shape ones experience of the world, changing only through secret causes that no one fully grasps. In this volume, Dominic Mastroianni frames antebellum and Civil War literature within the history of modern philosophical skepticism, ranging from Descartes and Hume to Levinas and Cavell, arguing that its political significance lies only partially in its most overt engagement with political issues like slavery, revolution, reform, and war. It is when antebellum writing is most philosophical, figurative, and seemingly unworldly that its political engagement is most profound. Mastroianni offers new readings of six major American authors and explores the teeming archive of nineteenth-century print culture.1. Moods and the secret cause of revolution in Emerson; 2. Revolutional³'