Writing Revolution

In the last decade, formalist and deconstructive approaches to literary studies have been attacked by critics for isolating texts as distinctive aesthetic or linguistic objects, separate from their social and historical contexts. Yet historicist and cultural approaches have often reduced texts to no more than superstructural effects of historical or ideological forces. Peter J. Bellis examines a number of nineteenth-century American writers, including Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman, exploring the ways in which they engage with - rather than escape from or obscure - social and political issues.

Bellis has a compelling subject, aesthetics and politics, and a fascinating selection of writers, Hawthorne, Whitman, and Thoreau. The book is well written and well researched; discussions of the individual writers are smart and rich.--Betsy Erkkila "Northwestern University", Bellis is deeply at home in the texts he discusses. When he dives in, he brings back long-buried treasure.--Philip F. Gura "University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill", In this ambitious study, Bellis revisits three 19th-century American literary masters. Looking at these writers through a revisionist lens, he examines how each explores the dynamic relationship between literature and politics in a unique and instructive way . . . Although the subject of this book is not a new one--critics including F.O. Matthiessen, Larzer Ziff, Irving Howe, David Reynolds, and Walter Benn Michaels and Donald Pease have examined writers of the American renaissance at length--Bellis makes it his own by arguing that Hawthorne, Whitman, and Thoreau viewed their texts as forums for the testing of alternative cultural and intellectual possibilities . . . Bellis makes a compelling argument for the extent to which these 19th-century writers engaged matters of political, cultural, and social significance. Summing Up: Highly recommended.--Choice, One comes away from Writing Revolution with a strong impression that Bellis is an exceptional teacher. Clear, sharp, and passionate throughout, Bellis manages to bring new life and urgency to some well-traveled texts and concerns.--New England Quarterly

Peter J. Bellis is a professor and department chair at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. He is the author of No Mysteries out of Ourselves: Identity and Textual Form in the Novels of Herman Melville.