The Likeness of Things Unlike

A study of the incommensurable, often discordant elements that define major works of American literature. In Sharon Camerons essays, a magnetic constellation gathers works of Emerson, Whitman, Dickinson, Cather, and Stevenseach manifesting in its own terms the likeness of things unliketo form a loose commonality in a strain of American writing in which incommensurable elements cant be integrated and cant 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. Georg Lukcs describes the essayist as one who adapts himself to the essays smallness of formthe eternal smallness of the most profound work of the intellect in [the] face of life. With The Likeness of Things Unlike Cameron powerfully demonstrates Lukcss remarkable insight.