By Mitchell Meltzer

Description

The 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.

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: The Constitution and American Literature

Part One: The Constitution as a Secular Revelation

1. At the Beginning

2. The Path to Union

3. The People, Having Spoken, Speak

4. Almost a Miracle

5. The Paradox of Secular Revelation

Part Two: An American Literary Renaissance

6. Declarations of American Literary Independence

7. Preserving the Revelation

8. Preserving the Paradox

9. The Literary Renaissance of Secular Revelation

10. Essays in Time

11. A Poetic Form for Straying

12. Clinging to Narrative

13. Confidence and the Darkness of Revelation

Conclusion: The Literary Art of Uniting States

Notes

Index

Published Year: 2005 Format: Hard Back ISBN: 978-0-674-01912-6 Publisher: Harvard University Press No of Pages: 204 Our Price: £ 26.95 Reviews: 0 reivew(s).

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