Transcendental wordplay : America's romantic punsters and the search for the language of nature /

Bibliographic Details
Main Author:	West, Michael, 1937-
Format:	Book
Language:	English
Published:	Athens : Ohio University Press, [2000]
Subjects:	American literature > 19th century > History and criticism. Puns and punning in literature. Thoreau, Henry David, > 1817-1862 > Knowledge > Language and languages. American wit and humor > History and criticism. English language > United States > Rhetoric. English language > 19th century > Rhetoric. Transcendentalism (New England) Romanticism > United States. Nature in literature. Plays on words.

Table of Contents:

Spellers, punsters, and spread-eagle linguistics
Enlightened Europeans, romantic Americans: origins of our transcendental quest for the language of nature
Parsing the language of nature
Antebellum America goes gaga over grammar
Copyrighting etymological ecstasy
Thoreau and the life of words
The ironic drift in Antebellum language philosophy
Go slow: man thinking
Wordplay, romantic irony, and the forms of Antebellum fiction
Savoring the wiles of words
Whitman's experiments with language
Thoreau and the sounds of silence
Walden's antic dialectic between self and society
Scatology and eschatology: the heroic dimensions of Thoreau's wordplay.