Longfellow and the Volume of the World
Longfellow and the Volume of the World
Accused of parading as ‘a Dandy in the clean and elegantly ornamented streets and trim gardens of his verse,’ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow drew the ire of literary nationalist peers who insisted that his reverence for Old World tradition stifled American creativity. As a professor of European languages and literatures, however, a surprisingly radical Longfellow fought to give Americans access to a cosmopolitan education in open lectures, anthologies, and translations. In his reading of Dante and Goethe, he searched for universal elements of literature, which he invoked to counteract nativist claims made by the Young Americans, whom he satirized as jingoists in his novel Kavanagh (1849). In his narrative poem Evangeline (1847), Longfellow puts his theory of literary universalism into practice as he shapes an American landscape ruled by emotion, not territorial conquest.
Keywords: Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, Dante Alighieri, Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, Education, Europe, Anthologies, Translations, Emotion, Kavanagh, Evangeline
Edinburgh Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs, and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us.
