J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur's Letters from an American Farmer
- the semi-autobiographical series of essays first published in
1782 - is like an acorn in which the whole gnarly tree of
fundamental American obsessions can be found in embryonic form: the
addled affair between civilization and the land; the myth of the
frontier; the ethic of individualism; the tension between liberty
and equality; the melting pot; slavery. Moore (English/Florida
State Univ.) has edited this new volume of essays, which Crevecoeur
(1735-1813) left unpublished and which were discovered more than a
century after his death. Like the more celebrated Letters, these
are essays in the form of reportorial letters to Europe about life
in the new American country. Among the topics addressed in these
further letters are: "Hospitals," "Liberty of Worship," "Frontier
Woman," and "Landscapes." Moore offers a scholarly introduction and
a cautious editorial hand that, striving for the feel of a
manuscript, retains ampersands and archaic (or at least
idiosyncratic) spellings. (Kirkus Reviews)
This is a critical edition of the essays that J. Hector St. John de
Crevecoeur (1735-1813) wrote in English but did not include in
Letters from an American Farmer. First published in 1782, Letters
from an American Farmer is an eighteenth-century cultural
masterpiece. Written in English by a French-born immigrant, it is a
collection of semiautobiographical writings in epistolary form that
describe daily life along the northern frontier during the days
leading up to the American Revolution. Conveying the attitudes,
beliefs, aspirations, and conflicting loyalties of common settlers,
Letters has helped subsequent generations to grasp the ethos of a
nascent America. More than a century after Crevecoeur's death,
three bound manuscript volumes surfaced that included not only the
original handwritten texts of most of Letters but also the
twenty-two similar writings that now make up More Letters from the
American Farmer. Those manuscript volumes are now housed in the
Library of Congress. Five of the pieces in More Letters are
previously unpublished; the others were first published in 1925-26
but were so inconsistently and arbitrarily edited as to
misrepresent the author. This edition has been awarded the emblem
of the Modern Language Association's Committee on Scholarly
Editions. It is based on an examination of all available relevant
textual sources and includes extensive textual and historical
contextual information. Rather than modernizing Crevecoeur's
capitalization, punctuation, and spelling, Dennis D. Moore has
preserved the original texts as closely as possible. Thus, More
Letters marks the first appearance of these twenty two writings as
Crevecoeur composed them. In his generalintroduction, Moore
discusses the various personae through which Crevecoeur speaks in
these essays and notes the stylistic and topical similarities and
variations between these writings and those collected in Letters.
Pointing to Crevecoeur's evident influences and interests, Moore
discusses recurrent themes and images related to medicine, law,
religion, classicism, enlightenment philosophy, nationalism,
agrarianism, aggression and war, and the cults of sensibility and
domesticity. Revising and expanding what we thought we knew about
Crevecoeur and his lifelong absorption in America and Americanness,
More Letters also makes a significant contribution to the study of
early American culture.
General
Is the information for this product incomplete, wrong or inappropriate?
Let us know about it.
Does this product have an incorrect or missing image?
Send us a new image.
Is this product missing categories?
Add more categories.
Review This Product
No reviews yet - be the first to create one!
Welcome to Loot.co.za!
Sign in / Register |Wishlists & Gift Vouchers |Help | Advanced search
