Read more
Informationen zum Autor R.C. De Prospo is professor of English at Washington College of Maryland. Klappentext The Latest Early American Literature, according to readers for the University of Delaware Press, is "a collection of polemics and manifestoes." In it R. C. De Prospo bids to follow in the footsteps of the two, rare, early Americanist dissenters whom Philip F. Gura once distinguished as "prophets without honor in the field": William Spengemann and Michael Colacurcio. The book contends that a supposedly retired nationalist/modernist "telos" continues to reign in most of the latest scholarship, and even more influentially in all of the current literary histories and anthologies, no matter how expansive in gender, ethnic, racial, and "hemispheric" inclusiveness they profess to be. Old teloi, in particular that old American exceptionalist one, can be cunning.Updating and expanding upon essays written over the past thirty years, De Prospo proposes not only negatively to critique how the latest scholarly receptions of early American literature differ insignificantly from the earlier ones, but positively to propose how a transnationalist concession-that as a neocolonial culture America's lags behind that of Europe-might advance post-modern historiography by radically repositioning the past as no longer the present's diachronic predecessor but, to quote Lyotard's semiotics, its synchronic "differend." Closer to earth, De Prospo tries at the same time to remain mindful of the pedagogical imperative that ultimately to save the texts of early American literature will require making them legible to average non-specialist, never-to-become specialist undergraduate general education students. To facilitate this he introduces in the concluding section of The Latest Early American Literature what will probably be taken as its most radical intervention: the redefinition of Edgar Allan Poe as an early American writer. Zusammenfassung The Latest Early American Literature both negatively critiques how the latest scholarly receptions of early American literature differ insignificantly from the earliest ones and positively proposes how a transnationalist concession—that America’s neocolonial culture lags behind that of Europe—might advance postmodern theorizing. Inhaltsverzeichnis ForewordI. The Latest Early American Literature1. The Latest Early American Literature2. Romancing the Medieval3. Marginalizing Early American Literature4. The Tain(e) of/in Spengemann's MirrorII. Humanizing the Monster5. Humanizing the Monster6. Captivity in the Classroom7. Old Orthodoxy in the New Nation8. No Notes from Underground: The Subterranean in the Bartrams and Brockden BrownIII. Before/Beyond Multiculturalism9. Before/Beyond Multiculturalism10. Marketing Accounts of the Colonial Frontier11. Paine and Sièyes12. The Least Possible NationIV. E(arly). A(merican). Poe13. E(arly). A(merican). Poe14. Poe's Alpha Poem15. Gide, Poe, Rowlandson16. Whose/Who's Ligeia?AfterwordBibliographyIndexAbout the Author...
