The Postcolonial and Imperial Experience in American Transcendentalism

MAREK PARYZ Associate Professor and Chair of the Section of American Literature at the Institute of English Studies at the University of Warsaw, Poland, and editor of the Polish Journal for American Studies.

Introduction: Mapping the Field PART I: RALPH WALDO EMERSON: THE DOUBLE FIGURATION Figures of Dependence: Exploring the Postcolonial in Emerson's Selected Texts Beyond the Traveler's Testimony: English Traits and the Construction of Postcolonial Counter-Discourse Emerson, New England, and the Rhetoric of Expansion PART II: HENRY DAVID THOREAU: THE IMPERIAL IMAGINARY Thoreau's Imperial Fantasy: Walden versus Robinson Crusoe The Politics of the Genre: Exploration and Ethnography in The Maine Woods PART III: WALT WHITMAN: THE NATIONAL TRAJECTORY Postcolonial Whitman: The Poet and the Nation in the 1855 Preface to Leaves of Grass Passage to (More Than) India: The Poetics and Politics of Whitman's Textualization of the Orient Conclusion: Representative Men