Title: Romantic revisions in novels from the Americas /
Authors: Maxwell, Lauren Rule.
Publisher: Purdue University Press,
Year: 2013
Subjects: American fiction History and criticism; Romanticism Influence.; Literatur; Romantik; USA
Abstract: "Why are twentieth-century novelists from former British colonies in the Americas preoccupied with British Romantic poetry? In Romantic Revisions, Lauren Rule Maxwell examines five novels--Kincaid's Lucy, Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, McCarthy's Blood Meridian, Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, and Harris's Palace of the Peacock--that contain crucial scenes engaging British Romantic poetry. Each work adapts figures from British Romantic poetry and translates them into an American context. Kincaid relies on the repeated image of the daffodil, Atwood displaces Lucy, McCarthy upends the American arcadia, Fitzgerald heaps Keatsian images of excess, and Harris transforms the albatross. In her close readings, Maxwell suggests that the novels reframe Romantic poetry to allegorically confront empire, revealing how subjectivity is shaped by considerations of place and power.^
Contents: Wordsworthian intertexts in Kincaid's Lucy -- Specters of US empire in Atwood's fiction -- McCarthy's Blood Meridian, Byron, and the US frontier -- Keatsian echoes and US materialism in The Great Gatsby -- The Coleridgean poetics of palace of the peacock -- Conclusion: British legacy in the Americas.