A01=John Mac Kilgore
American protest literature
American Revolution and literature
antebellum American literature
antinomianism
Author_John Mac Kilgore
Category=DSA
Category=DSB
Category=JPVR
constituent power
early American literature
emotionaffect
Enthusiasm and American literature
enthusiasm and fanaticism
enthusiasm and the United States
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
nineteenth-century American literature
philosophy of the event
religion and revolution
religion and secularization
religious enthusiasm in the United States
revivalism and American literature
War of 1812 and literature
Product details
- ISBN 9781469629728
- Weight: 455g
- Dimensions: 157 x 235mm
- Publication Date: 31 Oct 2016
- Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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“Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm,” wrote RalphWaldo Emerson in 1841. While this statement may read like an innocuoustruism today, the claim would have been controversial in the antebellumUnited States when enthusiasm was a hotly contested term associated withreligious fanaticism and poetic inspiration, revolutionary politics and imaginativeexcess. In analysing the language of enthusiasm in philosophy, religion,politics, and literature, John Mac Kilgore uncovers a tradition of enthusiasmlinked to a politics of emancipation. The dissenting voices chronicledhere fought against what they viewed as tyranny while using their writings toforge international or antinationalistic political affiliations.
Pushing his analysis across national boundaries, Kilgore contends thatAmerican enthusiastic literature, unlike the era’s concurrent sentimentalcounterpart, stressed democratic resistance over domestic reform as it navigatedthe global political sphere. By analysing a range of canonical Americanauthors—including William Apess, Phillis Wheatley, Harriet Beecher Stowe,and Walt Whitman—Kilgore places their works in context with the causes,wars, and revolutions that directly or indirectly engendered them. In doingso, he makes a unique and compelling case for enthusiasm’s centrality in theshaping of American literary history.
Pushing his analysis across national boundaries, Kilgore contends thatAmerican enthusiastic literature, unlike the era’s concurrent sentimentalcounterpart, stressed democratic resistance over domestic reform as it navigatedthe global political sphere. By analysing a range of canonical Americanauthors—including William Apess, Phillis Wheatley, Harriet Beecher Stowe,and Walt Whitman—Kilgore places their works in context with the causes,wars, and revolutions that directly or indirectly engendered them. In doingso, he makes a unique and compelling case for enthusiasm’s centrality in theshaping of American literary history.
John Mac Kilgore is assistant professor of English at Florida State University.
