The American Historical Romance: 23 (Cambridge Studies in Americ

The American Historical RomanceAuthor(s): George Dekker\nFormat: Paperback\nPublisher: Cambridge University Press, United Kingdom\nImprint: Cambridge University Press\nISBN-13: 9780521389372, 978-0521389372\nSynopsis\nThis 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, t