Part 1 of this book examines the English contribution to the 'American
Revolution', and the various models of relationship between Britain and
America that existed for writers in the 'American Renaissance'. Part 2
considers the politics of James Fenimore Cooper, and the inspirational
role of the English Romantics in the thinking of Emerson and the art of
Bryant, Thoreau, Hawthorne and Poe, Melville, Whitman and Dickinson. An
epilogue explores how Dickinson and Whitman responded to the seductive
music of Alfred Lord Tennyson. "How this study is received will say as
much about the recovery of serious interest in literary history as about
the work's quality. Learned, rigorous in testing its assertions, mordant
and spirited in its expression, Romantic Dialogues makes one wonder how
one ever read the American text at all without the British context. ....
An extraordinary achievement" -Robert Weisbuch, New England Quarterly