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 familiar enough with the literature and controversies of seventeenth-century England to appropriate its cultural artifacts for their own purposes.

American writers such as Emerson, Fuller, Thoreau, and Melville consciously absorbed literary, philosophical, and political strategies from their reading in the earlier period in order to interrogate the orthodoxies of American Whigs, as well as the agenda of the radical Democratic 'Young Americans.' 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.