by Anca Peiu
Romantic Renderings of Selfhood in Classic American Literature is the complete form of Anca Peiu’s book on eleven masters of American literature. The previous volume entitled Five Versions of Selfhood in 19th Century American Literature represents the author’s first step toward the accomplishment of her literary studies gathered here.
The new book consists of two sections: the former one titled “Selfhood in/or Poetry,” dealing with five foremost authors who laid the foundations of American poetry; and the second section called “Selfhood in/or Story-Telling,” containing essays on the main works of six emblematic American masters of fiction.
Anca Peiu’s present book is meant for students of philology, in the first place; likewise, for those high-school pupils interested in American culture and its classic writers; and, last but not least, for those readers who are still fond of the American literary canon, and also aware of its undeniable impact upon our own approach of the contemporary world.
In Romania, all the eleven American writers discussed here – E. A. Poe, R. W. Emerson, H. D. Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Kate Chopin – are part of any syllabus bibliography for the study of American literature. Therefore our return today to these American masterpieces of universal literature acquires an enhanced significance.
