In The American Aeneas, John C. Shields exposes a significant
cultural blindness within American consciousness. Noting that the
biblical myth of Adam has long dominated ideas of what it means to
be American, Shields argues that an equally important component of
our nation's cultural identity -- a secular one deriving from the
classical tradition -- has been seriously neglected.
The author finds various Early American texts, including
pastorals, pastoral elegies, literary independence poems, tracts on
educational theories, religious discourses, and political writings,
laden with elements of classicism, particularly the myth of Aeneas
as depicted by Vergil. Shields demonstrates that Aeneas, Vergil's
hero of the Aeneid, was an especially apt figure for New World
discourse in that he epitomized "the sailor who struck out onto
dangerous, uncharted seas in order to discover a new land in which
to build a new civilization".
Shields shows how both the myth of Adam and the myth of Aeneas,
in crossing over to America from Europe, dynamically intermingled
in the thought of the earliest American writers. This
rearticulation of the myths of Adam and Aeneas became peculiarly
adapted to the demands of the American adventure in freedom.
Shields argues that uncovering and acknowledging the classical
roots of our culture can allay the American fear of "pastlessness"
that the long-standing emphasis on the Adamic myth has
generated.
The author's probing analysis sheds new light on the works of
such seminal figures as Edward Taylor, Cotton Mather, Phillis
Wheatley, George Washington, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman
Melville. But it does much more than that -- it posits a new model
for Americanstudies. "This model", Shields writes, "is not composed
of a single strand which can only direct the struggle to explore
the dimensions of American culture in a linear fashion -- an
inevitable dead end. The image of two strands coming together,
intertwining and interconnecting so as to accommodate virtually
infinite possibilities, more accurately captures the dynamic of
Americanness".
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