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St. John de Crèvecoeur
St. John de Crèvecoeur by Thomas Philbrick is the first book-length study of the author of Letters from an American Farmer to appear in more than fifty years. Crèvecoeur has long been recognized as an important contributor to the European idea of America, as an influential celebrator of the pleasures of rural life, and as an engaging delineator of American nature, but the full extent and true character of his literary achievement have never before been explored by a critical examination of the whole body of his writings.
Through an analysis of the themes and forms of the Letters, the other English sketches, and the later French works, Professor Philbrick traces the shifting emphasis of Crèvecoeur's thought and the radical changes in his technique over the course of his entire literary career. The portrait which emerges is that of a writer obsessed by the meaning of the American experience, one to whom the New World figured both as idyll and as nightmare. The central contention of the book is that the artistry with which Crèvecoeur rendered that complex image entitles him to a place in the first rank of American prose writers of the eighteenth century and indicates that he, more fully and intensely than any of his contemporaries, anticipated the problematic vision of America that was to dominate the literary imagination of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Through an analysis of the themes and forms of the Letters, the other English sketches, and the later French works, Professor Philbrick traces the shifting emphasis of Crèvecoeur's thought and the radical changes in his technique over the course of his entire literary career. The portrait which emerges is that of a writer obsessed by the meaning of the American experience, one to whom the New World figured both as idyll and as nightmare. The central contention of the book is that the artistry with which Crèvecoeur rendered that complex image entitles him to a place in the first rank of American prose writers of the eighteenth century and indicates that he, more fully and intensely than any of his contemporaries, anticipated the problematic vision of America that was to dominate the literary imagination of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
177 pages, Unknown Binding
First published January 1, 1970
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