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    The Representation of the Self in the
                 American Renaissance

University of North Carolina Press, 1987

CONTENTS

Chapter One.   Psychological Mythmaking

Chapter Two.   Emerson’s Myth of the Unconscious

Chapter Three. Thoreau’s Landscape of Being

Chapter Four.   “Song of Myself”: A Field of Potential
                       Being

Chapter Five.    Recovering the “Idea of Woman”:
                       Woman in the Nineteenth Century and
                       Its Mythological Background

Chapter Six.     Materializing the Psyche:
                       The Counterexample of Poe, Hawthorne,
                       and Melville

Chapter Seven. The Question of the Subject

“An important contribution to the current debate on the fate of Emersonian idealism in American culture.  Steele interprets the transformation of the romantic self into the modern psyche in terms appropriate both to his nineteenth-century subjects--Emerson, Thoreau, Fuller, Whitman, Hawthorne, Poe, and Melville--and to the current subject of critical theories: the social authority of the writer. In this double function, then, this book is an important contribution to reinterpretation of American modernity.”

    John Carlos Rowe,
    University of California, Irvine

“The most thorough and wide-ranging examination we have of the major writing of the period of the American Renaissance in the light of modern psychological theory and criticism. An important book.”

    Robert D. Richardson, Jr.
    University of Denver

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