The American Aeneas: Classical Origins of the American Self

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Univ. of Tennessee Press, 2004 - History - 478 pages



Choice Magazine Outstanding Academic Book??

"John Shields's book is a provocative challenge to the venerable Adamic myth so exhaustively deployed in examinations of early American literature and in American studies. Moreover, The American Aeneas builds wonderfully on Shields's considerable work on Phillis Wheatley. "?--American Literature??

"The American Aeneas should be of interest to classicists and American studies scholars alike." ?--The New England Quarterly??

John Shields exposes a significant cultural blindness within American consciousness. Noting the biblical character Adam as an archetype who has long dominated ideas of what it means to be American, Shields argues that an equally important component of our nation's cultural identity--a secular one deriving from the classical tradition--has been seriously neglected.??Shields shows how Adam and Aeneas--Vergil's hero of the Aeneid-- in crossing over to American from Europe, dynamically intermingled in the thought of the earliest American writers. Shields argues that uncovering and acknowledging the classical roots of our culture can allay the American fear of "pastlessness" that the long-standing emphasis on the Adamic myth has generated.

John C. Shields is the editor of The Collected Works of Phillis Wheatley and the author of The American Aeneas: Classical Origins of the American Self, which won a Choice Outstanding Academic Book award and an honorable mention in the Harry Levin Prize competition, sponsored by the American Comparative Literature Association.

From inside the book

Contents

Edward Taylors Classicism
38
Cotton Mathers Epic in Prose
56
17201784
73
George Washington and the Vergilian Moment
165
1784 TO THE PRESENT
253
The Persistence of the American Aeneas in Hawthorne
297
The Persistence of the American Aeneas in Melville
311
Americas Classical Origins Besieged
334
Notes
363
Bibliography
393
Index
423
Copyright

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About the author (2004)

John C. Shields is professor of English at Illinois State University. He is the editor of The Collected Works of Phillis Wheatley, has edited several numbers of Style, and has served as an advisory editor to The Oxford Companion to African American Literature and to the twenty-three-volume American National Biography. His articles have appeared in American Literature, Studies in Philology, Studies in Short Fiction, African American Review, and other publications.

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