Manchester University Press Enthusiast!: Essays on Modern American Literature

Enthusiast! 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 modernized 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. Observing that the present age is bureaucratic , Enthusiast! builds on this story of American literature to stage its own polemic against the culture of the modern university. It shows how, for each of the writers discussed, literary activity the writing, reading and circulating of books stood in direct opposition to the foreclosures of bureaucracy. Literary culture, the book argues, following the examples of its writers, is sustained by enthusiasm; bureaucracy, in its abstractions and its blockages, kills enthusiasm. Enthusiast! is a history of American literature, and a study of literary production and transmission, pitched against the constrictions of the present age. Following 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. Review "This book reminds us why we go to the trouble of reading. It reminds us of what is at stake in writing. It calls for the enthusiastic circulation of literature as a form of communication that is not quantifiable, has no measurable benefits, fulfils no pre-existing criteria, won't get you a job, and can't be converted into anything else. In doing so it does a great service to the writers discussed and to its readers." -- John Beck From the Inside Flap Enthusiast! 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 OHara and James Schuyler have modernized and re-modeled Emersons 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, OHara, 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. From the Back Cover Enthusiast! is a polemical history of American literature told from the point of view of six of its major enthusiasts. Complaining that his age wa