The Handbook of American Romanticism presents a comprehensive survey of the various schools, authors, and works that constituted antebellum literature in the United States. The volume is designed to feature a selection of representative case studies and to assess them within two complementary frameworks: the most relevant historical, political, and institutional contexts of the antebellum decades and the consequent (re-)appropriations of the Romantic period by academic literary criticism in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

Presents analysis of some important works of American romanticism.

"This book can take its place on the shelf beside Henry Nash Smith's Virgin Land and Leo Marx's The Machine in the Garden."—Choice "[Gilmore] demonstrates the profound, sustained, engagement with society embodied in the works of Emerson, Hawthorne, Thoreau and Melville. In effect, he relocates the American Renaissance where it properly belongs, at the centre of a broad social, economic, and ideological movement from the Jacksonian era to the Civil War. Basically, Gilmore's argument concerns the writers' participation in what Thoreau called 'the curse of trade.' He details their mixed resistance to and complicity in the burgeoning literary marketplace and, by extension, the entire ' economic revolution' which between 1830 and 1860 'transformed the United States into a market society'. . . . "The result is a model of literary-historical revisionism. Gilmore's opening chapters on Emerson and Thoreau show that 'transcendental' thought and language can come fully alive when understood within the material processes and ideological constraints of their time. . . . The remaining five chapters, on Hawthorne and Melville, contain some of the most penetrating recent commentaries on the aesthetic strategies of American Romantic fiction, presented within and through some of the most astute, thoughtful considerations I know of commodification and the 'democratic public' in mid-nineteenth-century America. . . . Practically and methodologically, American Romanticism and the Marketplace has a significant place in the movement towards a new American literary history. It places Gilmore at the forefront of a new generation of critics who are not just reinterpreting familiar texts or discovering new texts to interpret, but reshaping our ways of thinking about literature and culture."—Sacvan Bercovitch, Times Literary Supplement "Gilmore writes with energy, clarity, and wit. The reader is enriched by this book." William H. Shurr, American Literature

American Romanticism and the Popularization of Literary Education focuses on three Romantic educational genres and their institutional and media contexts: the conversation, literary journalism, and the public lecture. The genres discussed in this book illustrate the ways in which the Transcendentalists engaged nineteenthcentury media and educational institutions in order to fully realize their projects. The book also charts the development from the semi-public conversational platforms such as Alcott’s Temple School and Fuller’s conversations for women in the 1830s to the increasingly public periodical culture and lecture platforms of the 1840s and the early 1850s. This expansion caused a reconsideration of the meaning and function of Romanticism.

This book reexamines traditional assumptions about early American attitudes toward nature. It also reopens and redefines the relationships of nature and civilization in the previous century, and in so doing, offers today's reader an insight into the basis for some contemporary attitudes toward the environment. The works of major and minor American writers are considered.

Offers students and general readers informative introductions to 10 major literary works of American Romanticism, including Poe's "The Raven" and selected stories, Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, and Thoreau's Walden.

First published in 1986. This outstanding collection of major essays by some of America’s finest literary scholars and critics provides students of American literature with a unique perspective of America’s Romantic literature. Some of these essays make connections between authors or define Romanticism in terms of one of the works; others address major issues during the period; others offer a framework for specific works; and, finally, some give interpretations for the reader. All of the essays offer distinctive voices that will engage students in this rich and memorable period of American literature.