American Literature as American Political Thought

FAIN: FB-12338-74

Catherine H. Zuckert
University of Notre Dame (Notre Dame, IN 46556-4635)

To investigate the considerable and largely unacknowledged contribution to American political thought represented by the works of James Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Walt Whitman. Because novels tend to reveal the moral character of the people they portray as well as the complex way in which that morality is related to the context (particularly in American novels the broadly political context of vitually unanimous commitment to equality and liberty), they shed considerable light on the quality and true extent of freedom in America.