The Complicity of Imagination

The Complicity of Imagination examines the rich and complex relationship between four nineteenth-century authors and the culture and politics of seventeenth-century England. Challenging the notion that antebellum Americans were burdened by a sense of cultural inferiority in both their thought and their writing, this study portrays an American Renaissance whose writers were deeply enough read in the literature and controversies of seventeenth-century England to appropriate its cultural artifacts for their own purposes. By exploring the broader cultural implications of intertextual relationships, this book demonstrates how literary texts participate in the artistic, political, and theological tensions within American culture.

• Establishes long overlooked connections between nineteenth-century American literature and seventeenth-century English culture • Explores the broader cultural implications of intertextual relationships • Balances an examination of larger cultural tensions with an awareness of the particular author’s sensibility

1. Cultural predicaments and authorial responses; 2. A Seraph’s Eloquence: Emerson’s inspired language and Milton’s apocalyptic prose; 3. Margaret Fuller’s The Two Herberts: Emerson and the disavowal of sequestered virtue; 4. As If a Green Bough were Laid Across the Page: Thoreau’s seventeenth-century landscapes and extravagant personae; 5. Melville’s Mardi and Moby-Dick; marvelous travel narratives, and seventeenth-century methods of inquiry; 6. Surmising the infidel: Melville reads Milton.