University of Georgia Press Righteous Violence: Revolution, Slavery, and the American Renaissance

Review Righteous Violence. . . provides college-level American history and literary collections with a study key to understanding the American Renaissance, using the writings of Fuller, Emerson, Douglass, Thoreau and three others to show how these key writers responded to slavery and the Civil War.--Midwest Book ReviewBuilding on his seminal European Revolutions and the American Literary Renaissance, Larry Reynolds's Righteous Violence shows how writers ranging from Emerson to Louisa May Alcott wrestled with the moral complexities of responding to and representing political violence. Among the great virtues of this excellent book is its close attention to overlapping national, trans-Atlantic, and hemispheric contexts.--Robert S. Levine "author of Dislocating Race and Nation: Episodes in Nineteenth-Century American Literary Nationalism "Larry Reynolds's Righteous Violence: Revolution, Slavery, and the American Renaissance opens up new territory in the study of Transcendentalism. . . . it exemplifies the strength and vigour of his fine study, which looks certain to become a key work in American Renaissance studies, and also invaluable to historians of slavery in nineteenth-century America.--Year's Working in English StudiesMakes a compelling case for basic tensions between pacifism and violence in every one of the authors: Fuller, Emerson, Douglass, Thoreau, Alcott, Hawthorne, and Melville. Reynolds cogently shows how these writers ambivalently respond to the turmoil about slavery and the advent of the Civil War, as well as to the fascinating spectre of European revolutions.--David Leverenz "author of Manhood and the American Renaissance "One of those rare and important books that will seem to its readers at once strikingly new and utterly central to the study of the American Renaissance. Reynolds's readings offer new ways to see each writer's emotional and intellectual trajectory and to deepen our understanding of political violence--an enterprise made resonant by the question of terrorism and violence in our own time.--Richard Millington "Smith College "Reynolds's chief strength is his ability to turn seemingly disparate writings, events, and political conversations into a coherent story of the complex nature of each thinker's questions, doubts, and ambivalences about violence enacted in the name of social justice.--Brigitte Fielder "New England Quarterly " Product Description Examines the struggles with the violence of slavery and revolution that engaged the imaginations of seven nineteenth-century American writers – Margaret Fuller, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Frederick Douglass, Henry David Thoreau, Louisa May Alcott, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville. About the Author LARRY J. REYNOLDS is a Distinguished Professor of English and the Thomas Franklin Mayo Professor of Liberal Arts at Texas A&M University. He is author or editor of eight previous books including Devils and Rebels: The Making of Hawthorne's Damned Politics and European Revolutions and the American Literary Renaissance.