Cambridge studies in American literature and culture ;

In her book The Regenerate Lyric, Elisa New presents a major revision of the accepted historical account of Emerson as the source of the American poetic tradition. New challenges the majority opinion that Emerson not only overthrew New England religious orthodoxy but founded a poetic tradition that fundamentally renounced that orthodoxy in favor of a secular Romanticism. In the years between the Unitarian controversy of early to mid nineteenth century and the rise of Neo-Orthodoxy a century later, New argues, the very orthodoxy that Emerson pronounced moribund found new life and sanctuary in the unlikeliest of places: the American poem. She contends that Emerson's reinvention of religion as a species of poetry was tested and found wanting by the very poetic innovators Emerson addressed and that a countertradition is evident in his major heirs - Whitman, Dickinson, Crane, Stevens, Frost, and Lowell. Emerson's own poetry failed to live up to his poetics and revealed instead an inherent paradox: the renewal of religion as, or in, poetic theory alienates religion from its life principle - theology - and disables the poem as well. Elisa New examines the poems in great detail, offering searching readings and concluding finally that "it is 'regeneracy' rather than 'originality' that is the American poet's modus operandi and native mandate."

"Susan Griffin uncovers and analyzes the important but neglected body of anti-Catholic fiction written between the 1830s and the beginning of the twentieth century in both Britain and America. Griffin examines Anglo-American anti-Catholicism and reveals how this sentiment was distilled to provide Victorians with a set of political, cultural, and literary tropes through which they defined themselves as Protestant and therefore normative. Griffin examines and broad range of writers including Harriet Beecher Stowe, Charles Kingsley, Henry James, Charlotte Bronte and a variety of lesser-known authors. She traces how nineteenth-century writers constructed a Church of Rome against which "America," "Britain," and "Protestant" might be identified and critiqued. This book will be essential reading for scholars working on British Victorian literature as well as nineteenth-century American literature; it will be of interest to scholars of literary, cultural, and religious studies."--BOOK JACKET.

The importance of native American realism is traced through a study of the evolution of dramatic theory from the early 1890s through World War I and the uniquely American innovations in realistic drama between world wars.