Views and Reviews in American Literature, History and Fiction

Views and Reviews in American Literature, History and Fiction shows William Gilmore Simms theorizing the "American" aspects of American literature, as well as the relationship between America's history and its imaginative writing. Simms presents and promotes the cultural agenda of the "Young America" movement, whose members included Melville, Poe, and Hawthorne. Views and Reviews is a central text in understanding the struggle for defining American literature that occurred between the Democratic nationalists of Young America against the culturally conservative, cosmopolitan, religiously orthodox, and Whiggish group centered around The Knickerbocker, one of the key nineteenth century American literary journals.