Home as Found

Authority and Genealogy in Nineteenth-Century American Literature

Eric J. Sundquist

• Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
• Year: 2019
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9781421431000
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Originally published in 1979. Eric Sundquist takes four representative writers—James Fenimore Cooper, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville—and considers the way in which each grapples with the crucial issues of genealogy and authority in his works. From all four a common pattern emerges: the desire to revolt against the past is countered by the need to invoke or even repeat it. Sundquist's approach to the texts is psychoanalytic, but he does not attempt a clinical dissection of each writer; rather, he determines how personal crisis became material for engaging with larger questions of social and literary crisis.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Copyright Page
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Epigraphs
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• One. “The home of my childhood”: Incest and Imitation in Cooper’s Home as Found
• Two. “Plowing homeward”: Cultivation and Grafting in Thoreau and the Week
• Three. “The home of the dead”: Representation and Speculation in Hawthorne and The House of the Seven Gables
• Four. “At home in his words”: Parody and Parricide in Melville’s Pierre
• Notes
• Index