LOCAL REPRESENTATION AND GLOBAL PERSEPECTIVE IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY AMERICAN LITERARY CULTURE

The four writers selected here – Frederick Douglas, Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Dickinson, Henry James – illustrate in a particularly compelling manner the sometimes contradictory, other times complementary impulse towards, on the one hand, a local American context and, on the other hand, a vision of the global or cosmopolitan settings of identity-forming episodes.