George Dekker

Originally published in 1967. In this critical survey of the fiction of James Fenimore Cooper, George Dekker devotes a good deal of attention to Cooper’s politics. He also explores the assimilation and development of the historical novel as first perfected by Sir Walter Scott. Cooper’s major formal innovations in the field of historical fiction were, like Scott’s, something more than mere experiments: they were made because American social and political developments differed radically from those of Scott’s Europe and so demanded a different formal expression.

Originally published in 1967. In this critical survey of the fiction of James Fenimore Cooper, George Dekker devotes a good deal of attention to Cooper’s politics. He also explores the assimilation and development of the historical novel as first perfected by Sir Walter Scott. Cooper’s major formal innovations in the field of historical fiction were, like Scott’s, something more than mere experiments: they were made because American social and political developments differed radically from those of Scott’s Europe and so demanded a different formal expression.

Originally published in 1953, this was the first edition of Dekker's plays to appear in print since the late nineteenth century. Thus, for many years prior, Dekker had been the least accessible of the prominent Elizabethan dramatists, with the result that his anthologized plays had received undue attention at the expense of other highly readable works of the second rank. Professor Fredson Bowers here presents a critical old-spelling text of the ordinarily accepted canon, together with a few works not collected previously but which seem to merit inclusion in an edition of Dekker's plays. The text of the complete plays is in four volumes and a complementary four-volume set contains detailed introductions and notes to all the plays. In a general textual introduction Professor Bowers sets forth a reasoned account of his editorial method and procedures for a critical edition according to bibliographical principles.

Exemplary Romantic novelists Ann Radcliffe, Sir Walter Scott, and Mary Shelley were likewise keen tourists and influential contributors to the discourse of Romantic tourism. The shaping power of this discourse—already highly developed in poetry, travel literature, and the visual arts by the time they began writing—affected not only what they saw and felt on tour but also how they imagined their greatest novels. Defining both tour and novel as privileged spaces exempt from the boring routines and hampering contingencies of ordinary life, these authors as well as many of their contemporaries and early Romantic predecessors effectively brought the tour into fiction and fiction into the tour. This is the first extended study of the intimate connections between these two major cultural innovations of the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and the first to pay close attention to the active commerce, the fluid interplay, within the larger discourse of Romantic tourism, between British Romantic fiction, poetry, tour books, landscape painting, and book illustration (as exemplified by the collaboration between Scott and J. M. W. Turner).

This book traces the tradition of American historical fiction from its origins in the early nineteenth century to the eve of World War II. It examines the historical novel's connections with Enlightenment and Romantic theories of history; with the rise of literary regionalism; with the ambitions of Romantic writers to revive the epic and romance; with changing conceptions of gender roles; and with the authors' troubled responses to the great revolutionary and imperialistic conflicts of the modern era. However, though inevitably much concerned with the theory of genre and with the specific contents of the genre of historical romance, Professor Dekker devotes most of his book to new readings of major texts by James Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Allen Tate, Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, and William Faulkner, as well as to the Briton whose name was synonymous with the genre for most of the nineteenth century - Sir Walter Scott. 'The American Historical Romance is the richest, most fully meditated and most rewarding yet written by this author ... It is the most important book on the relations of British and American fiction to come out for many years. No devotee of the American novel will ignore it.' -- The Times Literary Supplement

This book traces the tradition of American historical fiction from its origins in the early nineteenth century to the eve of World War II. It examines the historical novel's connections with Enlightenment and Romantic theories of history; with the rise of literary regionalism; with the ambitions of Romantic writers to revive the epic and romance; with changing conceptions of gender roles; and with the authors' troubled responses to the great revolutionary and imperialistic conflicts of the modern era. However, though inevitably much concerned with the theory of genre and with the specific contents of the genre of historical romance, Professor Dekker devotes most of his book to new readings of major texts by James Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Allen Tate, Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, and William Faulkner, as well as to the Briton whose name was synonymous with the genre for most of the nineteenth century - Sir Walter Scott. 'The American Historical Romance is the richest, most fully meditated and most rewarding yet written by this author ... It is the most important book on the relations of British and American fiction to come out for many years. No devotee of the American novel will ignore it.' -- The Times Literary Supplement

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