Mastroianni, Dominic
October 23, 2014
Politics and Skepticism in Antebellum American Literature. Cambridge University Press, 2014. Print.
This book frames antebellum and Civil War literature within the history of modern philosophical skepticism. Mastroianni argues that five of Emerson's most inventive interlocutors – Melville, Hawthorne, Dickinson, Douglass, and Jacobs - produced their most riveting political thought in response to Emerson’s idea that moods fundamentally shape experience of the world, changing only through secret causes that no one fully grasps.
