Imagining America

Peter Conrad

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2024
• eBook ISBN: 9781040253045
• Edition: 0
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Literature

In his book Imagining America (originally published in 1980), Peter Conrad shows how the English literary imagination over the course of a century devised for itself a contradictory series of ideal or alarming Americas which it then sets out to actualize. For Mrs Trollope, Americans are unkempt brutes, throwbacks to savagery; for H. G. Wells, they are a future race of cerebral technocrats. Oscar Wilde and Rupert Brooke want to redeem them by corrupting them with the insidious gospel of art; D. H. Lawrence wants to rescue them by fomenting revolution in their stale, sterile society. For W. H. Auden, Americans are an existential people, sad citizens of a deracinated modern world, suffering from anxiety; for Chrsitopher Isherwood, they are bland, sun-tanned Oriental angels. But there is a logic to the succession of these images, which Peter Conrads's narrative follows. The Victorians are disturbed by America because it is not yet a society and lacks the upholstery of manners. Their modern successors, however, praise it for this very disability and find there a psychological, mystical or even psychedelic freedom denied to them by the Europe they have left behind.

Imagining America is stimulating both as cultural history and literary criticism. Superbly written, it presents an argumentative tour de force in a style that is witty and diverting.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Acknowledgments
• Table of Contents
• 1 Imagining America: Versions of Niagara
• 2 Institutional America
• 3 Aesthetic America
• 4 Epic (and Chivalric) America
• 5 Futuristic America
• 6 Primitive America
• 7 Theological America
• 8 Psychedelic America
• 9 Mystical America
• Index