Overview

The English literary influence on classic American novelists’ depictions of gender, sexuality, and race With All The Devils Are Here, the literary scholar David Greven makes a signal contribution to the growing list of studies dedicated to tracing threads of literary influence. Herman Melville’s, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s, and James Fenimore Cooper’s uses of Shakespeare and Milton, he finds, reflect not just an intertextual relationship between American Romanticism and the English tradition but also an ongoing engagement with gender and sexual politics. Greven limns the effect of Shakespeare’s Much Ado about Nothing on Hawthorne’s exploration of patriarchy, and he shows how misogyny in King Lear informed Melville’s evocation of “the step-mother world” of orphaned men in Moby-Dick. Throughout, Greven focuses particularly on male authors’ treatment of femininity, arguing that the figure of woman functions for them as a multivalent signifier for artistic expression. Ultimately, Greven demonstrates the ambitions of these writers to comment on the history of the Western tradition and the future of art from their unique positions as Americans.

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Reviews

“With his open-hearted engagement with texts, Greven offers new styles of connection and navigates critical questions deftly and in ways that illuminate the work with tremendous lucidity and Élan. The writing is splendid.”—Wyn Kelley, MIT School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, author of Melville’s City: Literary and Urban Form in Nineteenth-Century New York

Author Information

David Greven is Professor of English at the University of South Carolina and the author of The Fragility of Manhood: Hawthorne, Freud, and the Politics of Gender.

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