All the Devils Are Here

The English literary influence on classic American novelists depictions of gender, sexuality, and race With All The Devils Are Here, the literary scholar David Greven makes a signal contribution to the growing list of studies dedicated to tracing threads of literary influence. Herman Melvilles, Nathaniel Hawthornes, and James Fenimore Coopers uses of Shakespeare and Milton, he finds, reflect not just an intertextual relationship between American Romanticism and the English tradition but also an ongoing engagement with gender and sexual politics. Greven limns the effect of Shakespeares Much Ado about Nothing on Hawthornes exploration of patriarchy, and he shows how misogyny in King Lear informed Melvilles evocation of the step-mother world of orphaned men in Moby-Dick. Throughout, Greven focuses particularly on male authors treatment of femininity, arguing that the figure of woman functions for them as a multivalent signifier for artistic expression. Ultimately, Greven demonstrates the ambitions of these writers to comment on the history of the Western tradition and the future of art from their unique positions as Americans.