John McWilliams's 1990 book was the first thorough account of the
many attempts to fashion an epic literature (the anxiously
anticipated 'American Epic') from a wide range of potentially
heroic New World subjects. At the outset, McWilliams considers the
many problems - cultural, political and literary' - of adapting
Enlightenment views of republican progress to a genre that had
traditionally celebrated the greatness of warriors. After a survey
of the many epic poems written during and after the American
Revolution, McWilliams shows how and why the epic had to be
transformed from imitative narrative poetry into the new, open
genres of prose history (Irving, Prescott and Parkman), fictional
romance (Cooper and Melville) and free verse (Whitman). Believing
that reviews are an important and slighted agent of literary
change, McWilliams has written his book in the form of
chronological literary history. His book, however, is no march of
dates within tired categories. The American Epic suggests that
imaginative writers of the Romantic era were in fact far less
proscriptive about the boundaries of literary genre than many a
twentieth-century writer and scholar.
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