| 50-5456 | PS374 | 2012-27363 CIP | | Humanities Language & Literature English & American | | Ferguson, Robert A. Alone in America: the stories that matter. Harvard, 2013. 283p bibl index afp; ISBN 9780674066762, $27.95. Reviewed in 2013jun CHOICE. | | Also author of Law and Letters in American Culture (CH, Mar’85), The American Enlightenment (1997), and Reading the Early Republic (CH, Jan’05, 42-2990), Ferguson here turns his attention to the theme of loneliness in American literature over the course of the last two centuries. Focusing on how challenging experiences (the “lords of life”: failure, betrayal, change, defeat, breakdown, fear, difference, age, and loss) turn American protagonists inward, often in the context of disturbed domesticity, he studies the works of Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Louisa May Alcott, Mark Twain, Henry James, Zora Neale Hurston, Edith Wharton, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Roth, William Faulkner, Toni Morrison, Saul Bellow, Don Delillo, Marilynne Robinson, and Walt Whitman. Because it covers such varied ground, the book is more suggestive than argumentative; the analyses of individual works seem a bit fleeting, and readers looking for extensive notes will be disappointed. Nonetheless, Ferguson offers thoughtful insights, and ultimately Alone in America is a satisfying romp through American literature, reminiscent of the great archetypal criticism of the 1950s, such as Henry Nash Smith’s Virgin Land (1950) and R. W. B. Lewis’s The American Adam (1955). Summing Up: Recommended. Lower- and upper-division undergraduates; graduate students; general readers. — J. W. Miller, Gonzaga University |
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