"...a valuable addition to nineteenth-century American studies...Because of its penetrating and also wide-ranging analysis, this book belongs on the shelf with such other classics about American literature in its formative stages as R.W.B. Lewis's The American Adam (1955), Richard Chase's The American Novel and Its Traditions (1957), Harry Levin's The Power of Blackness (1960), and Leo Mmarx's The Machine in the Garden (1964)." Journal of the Early Republic

• Preface; Acknowledgements; Introduction: Writing, reading, Romanticism; 1. 'Where…Is this singular career to terminate?': Bewildered pilgrims in early American fiction; 2. 'Where there is no vision, the people perish…': Prophets and Pariahs in the Forest of the New World; 3. Poe: Romantic centre, critical margin; 4. Emerson: experiments in self-creation; 5. Hawthorne: 'The obscurest man of letters in America'; 6. Thoreau's self-perpetuating artefacts; 7. Melville: Romantic cock-and-bull; or, the great art of telling the truth; 8. Douglass and Stowe: scriptures of the redeemed self; 9. Whitman: 'Take me as I am or not at all…'; Interchapter: Walt and Emily; 10. Dickinson's 'Celestial vail': snowbound in self-consciousness; Notes; Index.

"...a valuable addition to nineteenth-century American studies...Because of its penetrating and also wide-ranging analysis, this book belongs on the shelf with such other classics about American literature in its formative stages as R.W.B. Lewis's The American Adam (1955), Richard Chase's The American Novel and Its Traditions (1957), Harry Levin's The Power of Blackness (1960), and Leo Mmarx's The Machine in the Garden (1964)." Journal of the Early Republic

• Preface; Acknowledgements; Introduction: Writing, reading, Romanticism; 1. 'Where…Is this singular career to terminate?': Bewildered pilgrims in early American fiction; 2. 'Where there is no vision, the people perish…': Prophets and Pariahs in the Forest of the New World; 3. Poe: Romantic centre, critical margin; 4. Emerson: experiments in self-creation; 5. Hawthorne: 'The obscurest man of letters in America'; 6. Thoreau's self-perpetuating artefacts; 7. Melville: Romantic cock-and-bull; or, the great art of telling the truth; 8. Douglass and Stowe: scriptures of the redeemed self; 9. Whitman: 'Take me as I am or not at all…'; Interchapter: Walt and Emily; 10. Dickinson's 'Celestial vail': snowbound in self-consciousness; Notes; Index.