Journal of the Early Republic 

About: Journal of the Early Republic is an academic journal published by University of Pennsylvania Press. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): Politics & Democracy. It has an ISSN identifier of 0275-1275. Over the lifetime, 1492 publications have been published receiving 13664 citations.

The Significance of the Frontier in American History

Abstract: I had intended to begin my review of this book of essays by recommending that every subscriber to the Journal of the Early Republic read and ponder it. That was before I noticed the list price. Given the price tag, my first recommendation is to try to persuade your college or university library to acquire more than one copy of it. This strongly positive recommendation is not based on a conviction that every essay here provides the last word on its subject, but that the collection exemplifies a powerful and rewarding perspective on antebellum American history with wideranging implications, one that may well help shape a coming generation of scholarship. A salient contribution of the anthology is its demonstration of the international quality of present scholarly innovation in the field of American history. This volume views the century from 1763 to 1863 as united by a competition, often violent, over the domination and exploitation of the North American continent. The acquisition of land and of labor to work it are obviously central to such a perspective. Specific issues (including revolution, slavery, Indian relations, party politics, ideas of liberty, economic fluctuations, and warfare) are viewed as they arise within this context. The individual contributions to the collection exemplify solid, original scholarship. The Atlantic vision of American history, which has been so rewarding for over a generation, is implicitly enlisted by these authors in the service of their approach. Embracing their common perspective by

American romanticism and the marketplace

Abstract: "This book can take its place on the shelf beside Henry Nash Smith's "Virgin Land" and Leo Marx's "The Machine in the Garden.""-Choice "[Gilmore] demonstrates the profound, sustained, "engagement" with society embodied in the works of Emerson, Hawthorne, Thoreau and Melville. In effect, he relocates the American Renaissance where it properly belongs, at the centre of a broad social, economic, and ideological movement from the Jacksonian era to the Civil War. Basically, Gilmore's argument concerns the writers' participation in what Thoreau called 'the curse of trade.' He details their mixed resistance to and complicity in the burgeoning literary marketplace and, by extension, the entire ' economic revolution' which between 1830 and 1860 'transformed the United States into a market society'. . . . "The result is a model of literary-historical revisionism. Gilmore's opening chapters on Emerson and Thoreau show that 'transcendental' thought and language can come fully alive when understood within the material processes and ideological constraints of their time. . . . The remaining five chapters, on Hawthorne and Melville, contain some of the most penetrating recent commentaries on the aesthetic strategies of American Romantic fiction, presented within "and through" some of the most astute, thoughtful considerations I know of commodification and the 'democratic public' in mid-nineteenth-century America. . . . Practically and methodologically, "American Romanticism and the Marketplace" has a significant place in the movement towards a new American literary history. It places Gilmore at the forefront of a new generation of critics who are not just reinterpreting familiar texts or discovering new texts to interpret, but reshaping our ways of thinking about literature and culture."-Sacvan Bercovitch, "Times Literary Supplement" "Gilmore writes with energy, clarity, and wit. The reader is enriched by this book." William H. Shurr, "American Literature"