Lucidly written and combatively argued, this book takes enthusiasm to be a defining feature of American literature, showing how successive major writers have modernized and re-modeled the
sense of enthusiasm founded by Emerson. Enthusiast! is a polemical history of American literature told from the point of view of six of its major enthusiasts. Starting with a brief
history of enthusiasm from Plato to Kant and Emerson, the book features chapters on: Melville, Thoreau, Pound, Moore, O’Hara, and Schuyler. Enthusiasm, it is argued, is the way literary
value is passed on. Each chapter presents an aspect of the writer as enthusiast and charts the changing sense of literary enthusiasm from Romanticism to the present day.
