J. Hector St John de Crèvecoeur - Böcker

`to the European, the American is first and foremost a dollar-fiend. We tend to forget the emotional heritage of Hector St John de Crèvecoeur' When D.H. Lawrence made this statement in his Studies in Classic American Literature, he was thinking of the Letters from an American Farmer. First published in England in 1782, the Letters came at a timely moment as attention was focused on America in the closing year of the Revolutionary War of Independence. Crèvecoeur's famous question `What, then, is the American, this new man?' was a matter of great interest, as it became evident that America, that new nation, was taking shape before the eyes of the world. Some of American literature's most pressing and recurrent concerns are adumbrated in the substance and style of the Letters: in addition to the question of American identity, they celebrate the largeness and fertility of the land, personal determination, and freedom from institutional oppression. Darker and more symbolic elements complicate the initially sunny picture, however: the issue of slavery is raised in a particularly disturbing episode, and the final Letter, `Distresses of a Frontier Man,' dramatizes the disintegration of the rational enlightened society of agrarian America into a nightmare of confusion, incomprehension and premonitions of unspeakable evil. Written by an emigrant French aristocrat turned farmer, the Letters from an American Farmer has a good claim to be regarded as the first work of American literature, at once intensely interesting in its own right, and casting a long shadow of influence on both subsequent American writers and European travel accounts of the moral, spiritual and material topography of the new nation. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

Letters from an American Farmer was published in London in 1782, just as the idea of an “American” was becoming a reality. Those epistolary essays introduced the European public to America’s landscape and customs and have since served as the iconic description of a then-new people. Dennis D. Moore’s convenient, up-to-date reader’s edition situates those twelve pieces from the 1782 Letters in the context of thirteen other essays representative of Crèvecoeur’s writings in English.The “American Farmer” of the title is Crèvecoeur’s fictional persona Farmer James, a bumpkin from rural Pennsylvania. In his Introduction to this edition, Moore places this self-effacing pose in perspective and charts Crèvecoeur’s enterprising approach to self-promotion, which involved repackaging and adapting his writings for French and English audiences.Born in Normandy, Crèvecoeur came to New York in the 1750s by way of England and then Canada, traveled throughout the colonies as a surveyor and trader, and was naturalized in 1765. The pieces he included in the 1782 Letters map a shift from hopefulness to disillusionment: its opening selections offer America as a utopian haven from European restrictions on personal liberty and material advancement but give way to portrayals of a land plagued by the horrors of slavery, the threat of Indian raids, and revolutionary unrest. This new edition opens up a broader perspective on this artful, ambitious writer and cosmopolitan thinker who coined America’s most enduring metaphor: a place where “individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men.”

This is a critical edition of the essays that J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur (1735-1813) wrote in English but did not include in Letters from an American Farmer. First published in 1782, Letters from an American Farmer is an eighteenth-century cultural masterpiece. Written in English by a French-born immigrant, it is a collection of semiautobiographical writings in epistolary form that describe daily life along the northern frontier during the days leading up to the American Revolution. Conveying the attitudes, beliefs, aspirations, and conflicting loyalties of common settlers, Letters has helped subsequent generations to grasp the ethos of a nascent America.More than a century after Crevecoeur's death, three bound manuscript volumes surfaced that included not only the original handwritten texts of most of Letters but also the twenty-two similar writings that now make up More Letters from the American Farmer. Those manuscript volumes are now housed in the Library of Congress. Five of the pieces in More Letters are previously unpublished; the others were first published in 1925-26 but were so inconsistently and arbitrarily edited as to misrepresent the author.This edition has been awarded the emblem of the Modern Language Association's Committee on Scholarly Editions. It is based on an examination of all available relevant textual sources and includes extensive textual and historical contextual information. Rather than modernizing Crevecoeur's capitalization, punctuation, and spelling, Dennis D. Moore has preserved the original texts as closely as possible. Thus, More Letters marks the first appearance of these twenty-two writings as Crevecoeur composed them.In his general introduction, Moore discusses the various personae through which Crevecoeur speaks in these essays and notes the stylistic and topical similarities and variations between these writings and those collected in Letters. Pointing to Crevecoeur's evident influences and interests, Moore discusses recurrent themes and images related to medicine, law, religion, classicism, enlightenment philosophy, nationalism, agrarianism, aggression and war, and the cults of sensibility and domesticity.Revising and expanding what we thought we knew about Crevecoeur and his lifelong absorption in America and Americanness, More Letters also makes a significant contribution to the study of early American culture.

This is a critical edition of the essays that J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur (1735-1813) wrote in English but did not include in Letters from an American Farmer. First published in 1782, Letters from an American Farmer is an eighteenth-century cultural masterpiece. Written in English by a French-born immigrant, it is a collection of semiautobiographical writings in epistolary form that describe daily life along the northern frontier during the days leading up to the American Revolution. Conveying the attitudes, beliefs, aspirations, and conflicting loyalties of common settlers, Letters has helped subsequent generations to grasp the ethos of a nascent America.More than a century after Crevecoeur's death, three bound manuscript volumes surfaced that included not only the original handwritten texts of most of Letters but also the twenty-two similar writings that now make up More Letters from the American Farmer. Those manuscript volumes are now housed in the Library of Congress. Five of the pieces in More Letters are previously unpublished; the others were first published in 1925-26 but were so inconsistently and arbitrarily edited as to misrepresent the author.This edition has been awarded the emblem of the Modern Language Association's Committee on Scholarly Editions. It is based on an examination of all available relevant textual sources and includes extensive textual and historical contextual information. Rather than modernizing Crevecoeur's capitalization, punctuation, and spelling, Dennis D. Moore has preserved the original texts as closely as possible. Thus, More Letters marks the first appearance of these twenty-two writings as Crevecoeur composed them.In his general introduction, Moore discusses the various personae through which Crevecoeur speaks in these essays and notes the stylistic and topical similarities and variations between these writings and those collected in Letters. Pointing to Crevecoeur's evident influences and interests, Moore discusses recurrent themes and images related to medicine, law, religion, classicism, enlightenment philosophy, nationalism, agrarianism, aggression and war, and the cults of sensibility and domesticity.Revising and expanding what we thought we knew about Crevecoeur and his lifelong absorption in America and Americanness, More Letters also makes a significant contribution to the study of early American culture.