Secular Revelations: The Constitution of the United States and Classic American LiteratureThe United States Constitution, battleground of a politically bifurcated nation, and sponsor of that nation's now threatened cultural unity, is a quintessentially political document. Americans' representatives swear loyalty to it, and her soldiers die for it. Yet no one has ever seriously considered the formative influence this document, so central a force for all Americans, has had on American cultural life. Now, in this ambitious book, Mitchell Meltzer has for the first time demonstrated the extent to which the Constitution is both source and inspiration for America's greatest literary masterworks. Retelling the history of the Constitution's formation, Meltzer explains how the peculiarly paradoxical form of the Constitution, its secular revelation, underwent a literary rebirth after the passing of the Founders' generation, and issued in what is strangest and most characteristic in America's classic literature. By combining the secular with the revealed, a Constitutional poetics results that gives rise, in both politics and literature, to the formation of more perfect unions. Offering powerful new perspectives on Lincoln, Emerson, Whitman, and Melville, Meltzer reveals how the Constitution counterintuitively generated such oft-noted tendencies as these writers' penchant for self-contradiction, their willingness to court radical discontinuity, and their intensely conflicted, romance-directed fictions. Secular Revelations presents the Constitution in a new role, the inspiration of a great national literature. |
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... instance, of the bitterly disputed Roe v. Wade over which some have been willing either to spill blood themselves or to apologize for those who do, there has been no argument that the 1787 text, if it allows such interpretive findings ...
... instance, of the bitterly disputed Roe v. Wade over which some have been willing either to spill blood themselves or to apologize for those who do, there has been no argument that the 1787 text, if it allows such interpretive findings ...
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... instance, or the French, or the Chinese) and trace the suppression of some peoples along with the dominance of others in that long forgotten formation. But history is not memory, and it is memory by which people order their identities ...
... instance, or the French, or the Chinese) and trace the suppression of some peoples along with the dominance of others in that long forgotten formation. But history is not memory, and it is memory by which people order their identities ...
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... instances of a new American literature, different in important respects from the English literature before them, and in themselves of undoubted significance. Given my ambitious claim to demonstrate a link between the Consti- tution and ...
... instances of a new American literature, different in important respects from the English literature before them, and in themselves of undoubted significance. Given my ambitious claim to demonstrate a link between the Consti- tution and ...
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Contents
1 | |
9 | |
II An American Literary Renaissance | 55 |
The Literary Art of Uniting States | 156 |
Notes | 165 |
Index | 189 |
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Common terms and phrases
Address Ahab American Culture American literary American literature American Renaissance American Revolution authority beginning biblical called Cambridge century chapter claim colonies Confederation Confidence-Man conflict Congress consider Constitution's constitutional poetics Convention critical debate Declaration of Independence delegates describes divine document early Essays fact Federalist fiction Founders founding Franklin Hannah Arendt Harold Bloom Harvard University Press Hawthorne Herman Melville historians Ibid identity imagination insists instance Ishmael Jefferson Joel Porte John John Jay Chapman kind Knopf Leaves of Grass Letters Library of America Lincoln Madison means Melville's ment merely Michael Kammen Miscellaneous Notebooks Moby-Dick narrative nature novel origin paradox perspective Philadelphia poems poet poetry political precisely question Ralph Waldo Emerson ratification reader realm religious representation represented Republic republican Scholar secular revelation seems self-constituting sense soul speech stitution story symbolic thing tion tradition truth union United Walt Whitman white whale words writing York young