The Complicity of Imagination examines the rich and complex relationship between four nineteenth-century authors and the culture and politics of seventeenth-century England. Challenging the notion that antebellum Americans were burdened by a sense of cultural inferiority in both their thought and their writing, this 1997 study portrays an American Renaissance whose writers were deeply enough read in the literature and controversies of seventeenth-century England to appropriate its cultural artifacts for their own purposes. By exploring the broader cultural implications of intertextual relationships, this book demonstrates how literary texts participate in the artistic, political and theological tensions within American culture.
- ISBN13 9780521495387
- Publish Date 13 April 1997
- Publish Status Active
- Out of Print 6 June 2022
- Publish Country GB
- Imprint Cambridge University Press
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 310
- Language English