AMERICAN ERRANCY: EMPIRE, SUBLIMITY AND MODERN POETRY

The link between Romantic individualism and ideological contexts has preoccupied much criticism of American literature in the last twenty years. For the most part, critics arraign this tradition, suggesting that the writers abscond from difficult political dilemmas to the realm of transcendence. In consequence, the sublime as category for thinking about literary texts has been largely abandoned. Ralph Waldo Emerson's transcendence is considered at best naive, at worst as providing the nascent corporate capitalism of the late nineteenth century with an iconography with which to execute its agenda.