Recovering Literature's Lost Ground: Essays in American Autobiography

Overview

The nine essays in Recovering Literature's Lost Ground constitute a penetrating study of the genre of autobiography. James M. Cox's intent is neither to provide a survey of autobiography nor to develop a comprehensive theory of the form. Instead he offers refreshingly original readings of the works of Thomas Jefferson, Richard Henry Dana, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ulysses S. Grant, Henry Adams, Booker T. Washington, and Henry James.

The first essay, "Autobiography and America", introduces themes that recur throughout the succeeding essays. Showing how the New Crticism tended to neglect the nonfiction of autobiography in favor of its fiction, Cox envisions autobiography as coming into prominence at revolutionary moments in history when the play of politics threatens the essentially closed forms of poetry, drama, and the novel. He singles out Franklin's Autobiography and Rousseau's Confessions as classic autobiographical texts accompanying the age of democratic revolution.

The succeeding essays deal with autobiographical texts both in and out of the conventional American literary canon. These essays reflect a persistent effort to recover political, historical, and textual ground lost from the realm of literature in the process of thoretical acceleration and increasing academic specialization in American universities. In the concluding essay, devoted to Shelby Foote's three-volume narrative of the Civil War, Cox contends, not without a touch of humor, that though Foote's work is clearly historical rather than autobiographical, it is nonetheless a great life work.

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