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Bentley, Nancy 1961- "The Complicity of Imagination: The American Renaissance, Contests of Authority, and Seventeenth-Century Culture (review)"
American Literature - Volume 72, Number 3, September 2000, pp. 628-629
Duke University Press

As a critical term in new historicist scholarship, “complicity” usually characterizes literature’s often unconscious indebtedness to the culture it means to critique. For that reason, the title of this rigorous intertextual study may mislead. Learned and gracefully written, The Complicity of Imagination aims to reconstitute the category of the American Renaissance (Margaret Fuller joins [End Page 628] its ranks) as a name for works of high literary dissent that break free from the ideological orthodoxies of the broader culture. The book argues its case, however, while largely ignoring historicist scholarship that has challenged the...