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Discovery of Europe: The Story of American Experience in the Old World
Discovery of Europe The Story of American Experience in the Old World Author:edited by Phillip Rahv "This anthology of American writing about Europe opens with a letter written from London by Benjamin Franklin in 1772 and closes with Randolph Bourne's letters from France and Germany on the eve of the First World War. As the editor points out,"These dates are not arbitrary. Prior to the period of the Revolutionary War, Americans were colonial... more »s who perhaps still felt themselves more at home in the Old World than in the New . . . But if the literature of our European experience before the 1770s is so meager as not to tempt the anthologist, the literature of recent decades is so rich and various that he must of necessity refuse the hazard of it." "The interest of the American experience of Europe is to be sought primarily in the expressions of the American character it brings to light," writes Mr. Rahv. "For (the Old) World has served the native imagination both as myth and reality, and to the challenge it offered Americans have reacted with sharp differences among themselves--differences involving their deepest commitments to their country and sense of participation in the national fate." "The authors represented here include John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Washington Irving, James Fennimore Cooper, Herman Melville, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Margaret Fuller, William Dean Howells, Mark Twain, Henry James, Henry Adams, and William James."« less