LEADER 02386nam 2200361z- 450 001 9910552764203321 005 20210112135040.0 010 $a1-5261-2630-3 035 $a(CKB)4100000004822592 035 $a(MiAaPQ)EBC5405986 035 $a(VLeBooks)9781526126306 035 $a(EXLCZ)994100000004822592 100 $a20180708d2007 uy 0 101 0 $aeng 181 $ctxt$2rdacontent 182 $cc$2rdamedia 183 $acr$2rdacarrier 200 $aEnthusiast!: essays on modern American literature 210 $cManchester University Press$d2017 210 1$aManchester :$cManchester University Press,$d2007. 215 $a1 online resource 320 $aIncludes bibliographical references and index. 330 $aEnthusiast! is a polemical history of American literature told from the point of view of six of its major enthusiasts.Complaining that his age was 'retrospective', Emerson injected enthusiasm into American literature as a way of making it new. 'What,' he asked, 'is a man good for without enthusiasm? and what is enthusiasm but the daring of ruin for its object?' This book takes enthusiasm to be a defining feature of American literature, showing how successive major writers - Melville, Thoreau, Pound, Moore, Frank O'Hara and James Schuyler - have modernised and re-modeled Emerson's founding sense of enthusiasm. The book presents the writer as enthusiast, showing how enthusiasm is fundamental to the composition and the circulation of literature. Enthusiasm, it is argued, is the way literary value is passed on.Starting with a brief history of enthusiasm from Plato to Kant and Emerson, the book features chapters on each of Melville, Thoreau, Pound, Moore, O'Hara and Schuyler. Each chapter presents an aspect of the writer as enthusiast, the book as a whole charting the changing sense of literary enthusiasm from Romanticism to the present day. Lucidly written and combatively argued, the book will appeal to readers of American literature or modern poetry, and to all those interested in the circulation of literary work. 606 $aAmerican literature 606 $aEnthusiasm in literature 615 0$aAmerican literature. 615 0$aEnthusiasm in literature. 676 $a810.9005 700 $aHerd$b David$0834477 906 $aBOOK 912 $a9910552764203321 996 $aEnthusiast$91970139 997 $aUNINA