In exploring the origins and character of the American liberal
tradition, Myra Jehlen begins with the proposition that the
decisive factor that shaped the European settlers' idea of
"America" or the "American" was material rather than conceptual--it
was the physical fact of the land. European settlers came to a
continent on which they had no history, bringing the ideology of
liberal individualism, which they projected onto the land itself.
They believed the continent proclaimed that individuals were born
in nature and freely made their own society. An insurgent ideology
in Europe, this idea worked in America paradoxically to empower the
individual and to restrict social change.
Jehlen sketches the evolution of the concept of incarnation
through comparisons of American and European eighteenth-century
naturalist writings, particularly Emerson's "Nature," She then
explores the way incarnation functions ideologically--to both
enable and curtail action--in the writing of fiction. Her
examination of Hawthorne and Melville shows how the myth of the New
World both licensed and limited American writers who set out to
create their own worlds in fiction. She examines conflicts between
the exigencies of narrative form and the imperatives of ideology in
the writings of Franklin, Jefferson, Emerson, and others. Jehlen
concludes with a speculation on the implication of this original
construction of "America" for the United States today, when such
imperial concepts have been called into question.
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