Miles of Stare: Transcendentalism and the Problem of Literary Vision in 19th-C America

Michelle Kohler
University of Alabama Press

Miles of Stare explores the problem of nineteenth-century American literary vision: the strange conflation of visible reality and poetic language that emerges repeatedly in the metaphors and literary creations of American transcendentalists. Tracing this metaphorical conflict across genres from the 1830s through the 1880s, Miles of Stare illuminates the divergent, contentious fates of American literary vision as nineteenth-century writers wrestle with the commanding conflation of vision and language that lies at the center of American transcendentalism—and at the core of American national identity. http://www.uapress.ua.edu/product/Miles-of-Stare,5848.aspx