American Terror : The Feeling of Thinking in Edwards, Poe, and Melville / Paul Hurh.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Hurh, Paul, Author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Edwards, Jonathan, 1703-1758--Criticism and interpretation.

Edwards, Jonathan.

Poe, Edgar Allan, 1809-1849--Criticism and interpretation.

Poe, Edgar Allan.

Melville, Herman, 1819-1891--Criticism and interpretation.

Melville, Herman.

American literature--History and criticism.

American literature.

Terror in literature.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (313 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Stanford, CA : Stanford University Press, [2020]

Language Note:

English

Summary:

If America is a nation founded upon Enlightenment ideals, then why are so many of its most celebrated pieces of literature so dark? American Terror returns to the question of American literature's distinctive tone of terror through a close study of three authors—Jonathan Edwards, Edgar Allan Poe, and Herman Melville—who not only wrote works of terror, but who defended, theorized, and championed it. Combining updated historical perspectives with close reading, Paul Hurh shows how these authors developed terror as a special literary affect informed by the way the concept of thinking becomes, in the wake of Enlightenment empiricism, increasingly defined by a set of austere mechanic processes, such as the scientific method and the algebraic functions of analytical logic. Rather than trying to find a feeling that would transcend thinking by subtending reason to emotion, these writers found in terror the feeling of thinking, the peculiar feeling of reason's authority over emotional schemes. In so doing, they grappled with a shared set of enduring questions: What is the difference between thinking and feeling? Why does it seem impossible to reason oneself out of an irrational fear? And what becomes of the freedom of the will when we discover that affects can push it around?

Contents:

Frontmatter

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Abbreviations

Introduction: Reopening Darkness

1. Awakening Terror

2. Critical Terrors

3. The Air of Analysis

4. The Uneven Balance

5. Dread

Afterword: “Some Dim, Random Way”

Notes

Works Cited

Index

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 23. Jul 2020)

ISBN:

9780804794510

0804794510

OCLC:

1178769875