Recovering American Literature - Hardcover

Shaw, Peter

9781566630535: Recovering American Literature

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1566630533 ISBN 13: 9781566630535

Publisher: Ivan R. Dee, 1994

Considering the treatment meted out to the great classics of American literature—by Hawthorne, Melville, Mark Twain, and Henry James—Shaw shows convincingly how they have been systematically raided by academic critics in the service of political correctness, and virtually robbed of their deepest meaning. This book demonstrates that it is possible to read literature and be highly conscious of the political, without descending into the merely ideological. —Dinesh D'Souza

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About the Author:

Peter Shaw’s criticism has appeared in Partisan Review, Commentary, the American Scholar, and Virginia Quarterly Review. He has also written The Character of John Adams and The War Against the Intellect.

From Kirkus Reviews:

Another salvo in the war on political correctness in literary criticism. Shaw, whose work has appeared in Partisan Review, Commentary, and The American Scholar, demonstrates how ``free discussion of American literature is being stifled by a new, radical orthodoxy'' imposed by the academic establishment. Shaw, who claims that ``the literary object's power comes not from its politics but from its unique ways of generating meaning,'' contends that by ``putting America's literature on a plane with America's shortcomings, the critics have achieved a self-fulfilling denigration.'' He argues that American classics, regarded more as tracts than novels, are being used by contemporary critics to serve political ends. To prove his point and demonstrate how such works can be recovered as literature, Shaw chooses five 19th-century novels, all long-time members of the canon. Each, he argues, has been politicized: The Scarlet Letter as a woman's struggle against patriarchal orthodoxy; The Bostonians as a ``repudiation of marriage''; Moby Dick as a diatribe against capitalist enterprise; Huckleberry Finn as a disavowal of the Civil War and subsequent racial accommodations; and Billy Budd as a rejection of the state itself (and of the United States in particular). He skillfully deploys his arguments by quoting extensively from critics and writers, including Lionel Trilling, D.H. Lawrence, and Leo Marx, as well as giving his own close reading of the texts. Shaw makes a persuasive case free from ideological cant, but the battle he fights is by now a familiar staple in the cultural wars, so his sense of urgency and outrage is less than compelling. -- Copyright �1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

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