{"product_id":"9780226293943","title":"American Romanticism and the Marketplace","description":"\"This book can take its place on the shelf beside Henry Nash Smith's \u003ci\u003eVirgin Land\u003c\/i\u003e and Leo Marx's \u003ci\u003eThe Machine in the Garden\u003c\/i\u003e.\"—Choice\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e \"[Gilmore] demonstrates the profound, sustained, \u003ci\u003eengagement\u003c\/i\u003e with society embodied in the works of Emerson, Hawthorne, Thoreau and Melville. In effect, he relocates the American Renaissance where it properly belongs, at the centre of a broad social, economic, and ideological movement from the Jacksonian era to the Civil War. Basically, Gilmore's argument concerns the writers' participation in what Thoreau called 'the curse of trade.' He details their mixed resistance to and complicity in the burgeoning literary marketplace and, by extension, the entire ' economic revolution' which between 1830 and 1860 'transformed the United States into a market society'. . . .\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e \"The result is a model of literary-historical revisionism. Gilmore's opening chapters on Emerson and Thoreau show that 'transcendental' thought and language can come fully alive when understood within the material processes and ideological constraints of their time. . . . The remaining five chapters, on Hawthorne and Melville, contain some of the most penetrating recent commentaries on the aesthetic strategies of American Romantic fiction, presented within \u003ci\u003eand through\u003c\/i\u003e some of the most astute, thoughtful considerations I know of commodification and the 'democratic public' in mid-nineteenth-century America. . . . Practically and methodologically, \u003ci\u003eAmerican Romanticism and the Marketplace\u003c\/i\u003e has a significant place in the movement towards a new American literary history. It places Gilmore at the forefront of a new generation of critics who are not just reinterpreting familiar texts or discovering new texts to interpret, but reshaping our ways of thinking about literature and culture.\"—Sacvan Bercovitch, \u003ci\u003eTimes Literary Supplement\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e \"Gilmore writes with energy, clarity, and wit. The reader is enriched by this book.\" William H. Shurr, \u003ci\u003eAmerican Literature\u003c\/i\u003e","brand":"University of Chicago Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47067433631984,"sku":"9780226293943","price":28.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/9780226293943_p0.jpg?v=1763674188","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/9780226293943","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}