American Sympathy
Subtitle: Men, Friendship & Literature in the New Nation
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2001
Place of publication: New Haven, CT, USA
Language: eng
Number of pages: 352
Description: "In an analysis that weaves together literary criticism and historical narrative, Crain describes the strong friendships between men that supported and inspired some of America's greatest writing - the Gothic novels of Charles Brockden Brown, the essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson, and the novels of Herman Melville. He traces the genealogy of these friendships through a series of stories. A dapper English spy inspires a Quaker boy to run away from home.

Three Philadelphia gentlemen conduct a romance through diaries and letters in the 1780s. Flighty teenager Charles Brockden Brown metamorphoses into a horror novelist by treating his friends as his literary guinea pigs. Emerson exchanges glances with a Harvard classmate but sacrifices his crush on the alter of literature - a decision Margaret Fuller invites him to reconsider two decades later.

Throughout this book, Crain demonstrates the many ways in which the struggle to commit feelings to paper informed the shape and texture of American literature."--BOOK JACKET.
Table of contents: label: Introduction
title: The Ghost of André
pagenum: 1; label: 1
title: In the pear grove : the romance of Leander, Lorenzo, and Castalio
pagenum: 16; label: 2
title: The decomposition of Charles Brockden Brown : sympathy in Brown's letters
pagenum: 53; label: 3
title: The transformation, the self devoted, and the dead recalled : sympathy in Brown's fiction
pagenum: 98; label: 4
title: The unacknowledged tie : young Emerson and the love of men
pagenum: 148; label: 5
title: Too good to be believed : Emerson's "Friendship" and the Samaritans
pagenum: 177; label: 6
title: The heart ruled out : Melville's Palinode
pagenum: 238