Introduction: Mapping the Field -- PART I: RALPH WALDO EMERSON: THE DOUBLE FIGURATION -- Figures of dependence: exploring the postcolonial in Emerson's selected texts -- Beyond the traveler's testimony: English traits and the construction of postcolonial counter-discourse -- Emerson, New England, and the rhetoric of expansion -- PART II: HENRY DAVID THOREAU: THE IMPERIAL IMAGINARY -- Thoreau's imperial fantasy: Walden versus Robinson Crusoe -- The politics of the genre: exploration and ethnography in the Maine woods -- PART III: WALT WHITMAN: THE NATIONAL TRAJECTORY -- Postcolonial Whitman: the poet and the nation in the 1855 preface to Leaves of Grass -- Passage to (more than) India: the poetics and politics of Whitman's textualization of the Orient -- Conclusion: Representative men
Summary
"Analyses literary representations of the American experience in selected works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman. Reveals the ambivalence that underlay the cultural and political development of the United States as a former colony."--Provided by publisher
