SLAVERY, PHILOSOPHY, AND AMERICAN LITERATURE, 1830-1860.
Series: CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN AMERICAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE; 148
Publisher: CAMBRIDGE UNIV PRESS; Cambridge University Press
Published: Oct 17, 2005
Place of publication: CAMBRIDGE
Language: und; eng
Number of pages: 232
Description: "Maurice S. Lee demonstrates for the first time how the slavery crisis became a crisis of philosophy that exposed the breakdown of national consensus and the limits of rational authority. Poe, Stowe, Douglass, Melville, and Emerson were among the antebellum authors who tried - and failed - to find rational solutions to the slavery conflict. Drawing on antebellum moral philosophy, political theory, and metaphysics, Lee brings a fresh perspective to the literature of slavery to argue that romantic, sentimental, and black Atlantic writers all struggled with modernity when facing the slavery crisis."--Jacket.