Criticism > Nineteenth-Century Literary Criticism > American Literary Criticism in the Nineteenth Century - Helen Neill McMaster (essay date December 1928)


American Literary Criticism in the Nineteenth Century - Helen Neill McMaster (essay date December 1928)

Helen Neill McMaster (essay date December 1928)

SOURCE: McMaster, Helen Neill. “Ghosts.” Margaret Fuller as a Literary Critic. University of Buffalo Studies 7, no. 3 (December 1928): 35-42.

[In the following excerpt, McMaster claims that Fuller's critical work has been neglected by her editors and biographers.]

The early years of the “great Americano-European legend,” the years before the impending cataclysm of civil strife was to disturb the serenity of America, witnessed the birth of a new phase in New England culture. The Puritan settlers in New England had succeeded in establishing and maintaining, for nearly two centuries, a culture uncontaminated by the depraving influence of European thought; but the time inevitably arrived when their descendants, “the candid children of the West,” became aware of the barrenness of their intellectual heritage. This awakening was accompanied by an exodus of American students reared on...

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