|
COPYRIGHT 2002 Boston University
New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999. Pp. 207. $39.95.
Malcolm Kelsall's transatlantic rendering of post-Revolutionary Jeffersonian culture is a welcome corrective to the periodizing and geographical fictions that continue to frame our critical commonplaces about nineteenth-century literature. Joining British and American culture, Neoclassical and romanticist traditions, Kelsall does for the nineteenth century what eighteenth-century historians have been doing for a decade--exploring an expanded notion of the Atlantic world that allows him to slip the yoke of increasingly outmoded nationalist models. Since a good part of Kelsall's concern is with the emerging symbolic order of what he calls "the romantic nation," this tendency towards more expansive--or messy--models of cultural production also provides a powerful antidote to nationalism's own interior claims of boundedness and coherence. Posing the romantic nation in politically American but aesthetically and culturally transnational terms, the controlling thesis of the book might be described as this very problem--the romantic need to integrate incoherent social realities...
Read the full article for free courtesy of your local library.
| 
Bookmark this article
Print this article
Link to this article
Email this article
Digg It!
Add to del.icio.us
RSS
