The Limits of American Literary Ideology in Pound and Emerson

by Cary Wolfe

Overview

This study analyzes the power, allure, and consequences of radical individualism and the kind of cultural critique it generates in the major figure of American Romanticism, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and the central figure of American modernism, Ezra Pound. Both writers set out to criticize and heal the dissociation of ethics, economics, and politics that they saw as the alienating cultural consequence of capitalism. But because their vision of the inalienable individual was modeled on the structure and logic of private property, they reproduced the very contradictions and alienations that they set out to critique and overcome in their ambitious cultural projects.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521445559
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	01/28/1994
Series:	Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture , #69
Pages:	308
Product dimensions:	6.30(w) x 9.33(h) x 0.83(d)

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments; Introduction; 1. A politics of difference; 2. Critiques of capitalist (literary) production; 3. Economies of individualism; 4. 'Gynocracy' and 'red blood'; 5. Visionary capital; 6. Ideologies of the organic; 7. Signs that bind: ideology and form in Pound's poetics; Notes; Index.

Editorial Reviews

"The Limits of American Literary Ideology joins with a handful of other recent studies in seeking to change the kinds of questions scholars and critics put to Pound. In so doing it helps make the poet available to new audiences and to the important concerns of the next century." Michael Coyle, Paideuma

From the Publisher