Home as Found : Authority and Genealogy in Nineteenth-Century American Literature /
Eric J. Sundquist.
- 1 online resource (238 pages).
- Book collections on Project MUSE. .
Part of Chapter 1 originally appeared as "Incest and Imitation in Cooper's Home as Found, '' 1977 by The Regents of the University of California, and is reprinted from Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Vol. 32, No. 3, pp. 261-84, by permission of The Regents
"The home of my childhood": incest and imitation in Coopers' Home as found -- "Plowing homeward": cultivation and grafting in Thoreau and the Week -- "The home of the dead": representation and speculation in Hawthorne and The house of seven gables -- "At home in his words": parody and parricide in Melville's Pierre.
Open Access
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.
9781421430157
Psychoanalysis and literature. Families in literature. Authority in literature. American literature. Autorite dans la litterature. Psychanalyse et litterature. Familles dans la litterature. Litterature americaine--Histoire et critique.--19e siecle Authority in literature. Psychoanalysis and literature. Families in literature. American literature--History and criticism.--19th century