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American Sympathy: Men, Friendship, and Literature in the New Nation

Online ISBN:
9780300133677
Print ISBN:
9780300083323
Publisher:
Yale University Press
Book

American Sympathy: Men, Friendship, and Literature in the New Nation

Published:
11 May 2001
Online ISBN:
9780300133677
Print ISBN:
9780300083323
Publisher:
Yale University Press

Abstract

This book weaves together literary criticism and historical narrative to describe the strong friendships between men that supported and inspired some of America's greatest writing—the Gothic novels of Charles Brockden Brown, the essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson, and the novels of Herman Melville. The book traces the genealogy of these friendships through a series of stories. A dapper English spy inspires a Quaker boy to run away from home. Three Philadelphia gentlemen conduct a romance through diaries and letters in the 1780s. Flighty teenager Charles Brockden Brown metamorphoses into a horror novelist by treating his friends as his literary guinea pigs. Emerson exchanges glances with a Harvard classmate but sacrifices his crush on the altar of literature—a decision Margaret Fuller invites him to reconsider two decades later. Throughout, this book demonstrates the many ways in which the struggle to commit feelings to paper informed the shape and texture of American literature.

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