Doctrine and Difference

The Thematic Scale of Classic American Literature

Michael J. Colacurcio

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN: 9781032368733
• eBook ISBN: 9781003808718
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Doctrine and Difference: The Thematic Scale of Classic American Literature aims to expand and deepen our knowledge into the inquiry of "contextual historicism, " observing writers of the American nineteenth century, and their vastly differing approaches to perceptions such as race, gender, and national identity. Ranging from the religious acuities of the first American Puritans to the more secularized literary awakening of the American Renaissance and into late-century texts that deliberately resist the limits of received religious and political opinion, this volume seeks to uncover a history of human thought within classic American Literature. This volume critically observes these survivable works of literature, presenting insight into the "difference" made by conversation, dispute, and dramatized self-doubt within novels and poems of the historical past.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Permissions
• Preface: Literature, History, Politics, Philosophy
• 1 “A Strange Poise of Spirit”: The Life and Deaths of Thomas Shepard
• 2 Maypole and Surplice: Hawthorne and the (Re-)Writing of History
• 3 Idealism as it Appears: Refractions of Emerson in Hawthorne’s Mosses
• 4 “All but Madness”: Blasphemy and Skepticism in Moby-Dick
• 5 Taps of Drums and Pieces of Battles: Whitman and Melville on the Unwritten War
• 6 Sage of Amherst: Dickinson as Part-time Transcendentalist
• 7 Regional Men (Not So Much from Mars)
• 8 Modern Instances: Love and Marriage after Hawthorne
• 9 Democracy and Esther: Henry Adams’ Flirtation with Pragmatism
• Index