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From national to supranational conception of literature: the case of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.(Biography)

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From: ATQ (The American Transcendental Quarterly)
Date: 20061201
Author:Salska, Agnieszka

At the turn to the nineteenth century, prospects of American literature and programs for its development became the subject of intense national debate culminating, it is customary to assume, in Ralph Waldo Emerson's "The American Scholar" (1837)--"our intellectual declaration of independence," to repeat Oliver Wendell Holmes's well known dictum. But, despite the exciting fertility of the 1840s and 50s, the end of the century was marked by growing emotional and intellectual alienation of writers such as Mark Twain and Henry Adams and by the expatriation of others, most ...