Hobbes, Sovereignty, and Early American Literature

Inbunden, Engelska, 2015

Del 173 i serien Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture

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Beskrivning

Hobbes, Sovereignty, and Early American Literature pursues the question of democratic sovereignty as it was anticipated, theorized and resisted in the American colonies and in the early United States. It proposes that orthodox American liberal accounts of political community need to be supplemented and challenged by the deeply controversial theory of sovereignty that was articulated in Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan (1651). This book offers a radical re-evaluation of Hobbes's political theory and demonstrates how a renewed attention to key Hobbesian ideas might inform inventive re-readings of major American literary, religious and political texts. Ranging from seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Puritan attempts to theorize God's sovereignty to revolutionary and founding-era debates over popular sovereignty, this book argues that democratic aspiration still has much to learn from Hobbes's Leviathan and from the powerful liberal resistance it has repeatedly provoked.

Produktinformation

Utgivningsdatum:2015-07-28
Mått:160 x 235 x 22 mm
Vikt:570 g
Format:Inbunden
Språk:Engelska
Serie:Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture
Antal sidor:312
Förlag:Cambridge University Press
ISBN:9781107085299

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Mer om författaren

Paul Downes is Associate Professor of English and American Literature at the University of Toronto. He is the author of Democracy, Revolution, and Monarchism in Early American Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2002), which was a co-winner of the MLA prize for a first book. He has also written a number of essays on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American fiction. His work explores the concepts of democracy and sovereignty as they have been instituted and imagined in the early United States and in the discourse of transnational humanitarian intervention.

Recensioner i media

'Historically rigorous, formally astute, and theoretically provocative … assuredly will shape discussions surrounding democracy's place in nineteenth-century US literature and culture in the years to come.' John Funchion, American Literature

Innehållsförteckning

1. Sovereignty's new clothes; 2. Re-reading Leviathan: the 'state of nature' and the 'artificial soul'; 3. Hobbes in America; 4. 'Heaven's sugar cake': Puritan sovereignty; 5. Tyranny's corpse: Jonathan Mayhew's revolutionary sermon on Romans; 6. 'Imperium in imperio': founding sovereignty; 7. Tar and feathers: Hawthorne's revolution; 8. Hobbes, slavery, and sovereign resistance; 9. Nat Turner and the African American revolution.