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Overview
In recent years, scholars writing about the American Sublime have defined it in terms of a landscape of absence - an inner and outer landscape characterized by vastness, by blankness, by unrelieved whiteness, and by the so-called Oedipal struggle for power. Working firmly against these received notions, Linda Munk locates the American Sublime in the seemingly insignificant things of the everyday: in small and near and common objects, in humble persons, and in what the philosopher Stanley Cavell has called the 'ordinariness' of the American language. Focusing clearly on works by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, Walt Whitman, Flannery O'Connor and Jonathan Edwards, Dr. Munk develops a theory of the 'Trivial Sublime' that attends to the theology of the created world in its most minute and particular detail. For British readers especially, The Trivial Sublime offers a challenging explanation of the otherness of the American canon.Book Details
Published
January 1, 1993
Publisher
New York : St. Martin's Press, 1992.
Pages
196
Format
Hardcover
ISBN
9780312085612