Likeness of Things Unlike

A study of the incommensurable, often discordant elements that define major works of American literature. In Sharon Cameron's essays, a magnetic constellationgathersworks of Emerson, Whitman, Dickinson, Cather, and Stevens-each manifesting in its own terms"the likeness of things unlike"-to form a loose commonality in a strain of American writing in which incommensurable elements can't be integrated and can't be separated. The Likeness of Things Unlike is concerned with discordant elements of an aesthetic work and argues that these elements refigure the aesthetic wholes whose integrity they apparently violate. These intertwined, subversive elements are challenges to literary systems and are essentially philosophical in their rethinking of categories, and thus go beyond the aesthetic particulars that exemplify them. Cameron is known for rigorously and brilliantly connecting artistic achievement to radical ways of thinking. GeorgLukcás describes the essayistas one who "adapts himself to the essay's 'smallness' of form-the eternal smallnessof the most profound work of the intellect in[the] face of life." With The Likeness of Things Unlike Cameron powerfully demonstrates Lukács's remarkable insight.