Suchergebnisse

OUR understanding of any significant movement in human affairs can hardly be said to even approach completeness until the evidence from literature is in. Because writers of fiction and poetry tend to grope for meanings rather than superimpose them — Yeats called this process the "public dream" —literary criticism can bring to the surface what otherwise might lie buried in the culture's subconscious. And this is perhaps even more true for the history of the Negro in American literature than for other cultural phenomena — the Westering Movement or the Industrial Revolution, for example — since so much of that history has been an unconscious, or at least half-conscious, masking of issues that have been contorted by fear, guilt, and rage.

Printed prospectus of the American Literary, Scientific and Military Academy in Norwich, Vermont, approximately 1820. ; A manuscript draft filed with this prospectus is dated 1820 and in the hand of Alden Partridge.

Letter from Alden Partridge regarding the attendance of Henry H. W. Sigourney at the American Literary, Scientific, and Military Academy inserted after the front cover.

This essay ought to be seen as part of an ongoing attempt to view America's recent and almost feverish struggle to redefine its literature in multicultural terms from a more distant European perspective. Implied in this attempt is the observation that American literary critics - quite in contrast to their European counterparts - are increasingly faced with the need to consider the growing impact of literature on the academic politics of their nation.