Purloined letters

by Joseph N. Riddel

The six essays in Purloined Letters represent thirty years of careful meditation on the theory of a national literaturespecifically, "American" literature - and constitute the culminating work of the late Joseph N. Riddel's career. It was in The Inverted Bell, his groundbreaking study of William Carlos Williams and American modernism, that Riddel began to work at composing a history of American poetics in terms of "beginnings." The essays collected here (three of them never before published) carry the question of modernism back into classic nineteenth-century American literature - the works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, William James, and others - exploring Riddel's cardinal "American" oppositions: creation versus representation, poetry versus criticism, geography versus "ego-graphy." In Riddel's view, "American" literature belongs to a conceptual order, not to a historical period or geographical locale. "American literature," he believe