Dreaming Revolution: Transgression in the Development of American Romance - Hardcover

Scott Bradfield

9780877453956: Dreaming Revolution: Transgression in the Development of American Romance

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0877453950 ISBN 13: 9780877453956

Publisher: University of Iowa Press, 1993

Dreaming Revolution usefully employs current critical theory to address how the European novel of class revolt was transformed into the American novel of imperial expansion. Bradfield shows that early American romantic fiction - including works by William Godwin, Charles Brockden Brown, James Fenimore Cooper, and Edgar Allan Poe - can and should be considered as part of a genre too often limited to the Nineteenth-century European novel.
Beginning with Godwin's Caleb Williams, Bradfield describes the ways in which revolution legitimates itself as a means of establishing Political consensus. For European revolutionaries like Godwin or Rousseau, the tyranny of the king must be replaced by the more indisputable authority of human reason. In other words, democratic revolution makes people free to investigate the same truths and arrive at the same democratic conclusions. In the American novel, however, the Enlightenment's idealized pursuit of abstract truth becomes restructured as a pursuit of abstract space. Instead of revealing knowledge, Americans explore further territories, manifest destiny, limitless regions of the yet-to-be-colonized and the still-to-be-known.
In a spirited discussion of works by Brown, Cooper and Poe, Bradfield argues that Americans take the class dynamics of the European psychological novel and apply them to the American landscape, reimagining psychological spaces as geographical ones. Class distinctions become refigured in terms of the common people's pursuit of a meaning vaster than themselves - a meaning which leads them to imagine the always expanding body of colonial America. However, since class conflict is never successfully eliminated or forgotten, the memory of class struggle always reemerges in the narrative like a half-repressed dream of politics. In Dreaming Revolution, Bradfield reveals and interprets these dreams, opening these American novels to a richer and more rewarding reading.

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Review:

" This book makes an exciting and stimulating argument. Using Foucault's concept of transgression, Bradfield approaches significant texts by Godwin, Brockden Brown, Fenimore Cooper, and Edgar Allan Poe to argue against the prevalent belief that classic American fiction ought to be considered a special case separate from the class tensions and revolutionary tropes of the nineteenth-century European novel. This is an important, highly significant volume." --Geoffrey Green

"This book makes an exciting and stimulating argument. Using Foucault's concept of transgression, Bradfield approaches significant texts by Godwin, Brockden Brown, Fenimore Cooper, and Edgar Allan Poe to argue against the prevalent belief that classic American fiction ought to be considered a special case separate from the class tensions and revolutionary tropes of the nineteenth-century European novel. This is an important, highly significant volume."--Geoffrey Green

""Dreaming Revolution" is a cogent and compelling discussion of transgression in major American romances and their British progenitors... Bradfield provides convincing readings that demonstrate precisely how transgression as a romantic ideal is recuperated as an aspect of bourgeois ideology... what lends strength and originality to Bradfield's book are the clarity and care with which he conducts his readings of individual works... this is a strong contribution to the ongoing discussion of ideology and American literature." -Patrick O'Donnell

"Dreaming Revolution"is a cogent and compelling discussion of transgression in major American romances and their British progenitors Bradfield provides convincing readings that demonstrate precisely how transgression as a romantic ideal is recuperated as an aspect of bourgeois ideology what lends strength and originality to Bradfield s book are the clarity and care with which he conducts his readings of individual works this is a strong contribution to the ongoing discussion of ideology and American literature. Patrick O Donnell"

About the Author:

Scott Bradfield is assistant professor of English at the University of Connecticut.

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