American Sublime: The Genealogy of a Poetic Genre (Wisconsin Project on American Writers) - Softcover

Tracing ideas of the sublime in American literature from Puritan writings to the postmodern epoch, the author demonstrates that the North American landscape has been the ground for political as well as aesthetic transport. He adopts an historical approach to the subject.

As a poetic genre, the American sublime helped to produce the subject and site of American subjection as sublime. At least that will be one of my overall claims. Yet how does one stand, within a poststructural context of deconstruction and disbelief, to behold 'The American Sublime' as a communal construct of self and national empowerment that may never have been there except as a function of those vulgarly American contexts and beliefs?