Description: Righteous Violence examines the struggles with the violence of slavery and revolution that engaged the imaginations of seven nineteenth-century American writers--Margaret Fuller, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Frederick Douglass, Henry David Thoreau, Louisa May Alcott, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville.
Brief description: LARRY J. REYNOLDS is a Distinguished Professor of English and the Thomas Franklin Mayo Professor of Liberal Arts at Texas A&M University. He is author or editor of eight previous books including Devils and Rebels: The Making of Hawthorne's Damned Politics and European Revolutions and the American Literary Renaissance.
Review Quotes:
One of those rare and important books that will seem to its readers at once strikingly new and utterly central to the study of the American Renaissance. Reynolds's readings offer new ways to see each writer's emotional and intellectual trajectory and to deepen our understanding of political violence--an enterprise made resonant by the question of terrorism and violence in our own time.
--Richard Millington "Smith College"