From the sublime to the ridiculous: The image of Napoleon Bonaparte in the American literary renaissance

This dissertation explores the iconography of Napoleon Bonaparte (1769--1821) during what is commonly called the American Literary Renaissance of the middle nineteenth century. The claims of this dissertation are threefold: (1) Interest in and appropriation of the image of Napoleon was pervasive in the United States during the 1840s and 50s. (2) Particular American authors of this period were influenced by and engaged in the cultural production of "Napoleons." (3) This cultural production had direct ties to the expansionism/"empire-building" of the United States during this period.;The heart of the American Literary Renaissance is generally accepted as the time period between 1850, when Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter and Ralph Waldo Emerson's Representative Men were published, and 1855, when Walt Whitman published Leaves of Grass and the slavery issue finally began to tear the seams of the American republic. This period was one of remarkable literary production in the United States; some of the greatest literary works of the United States were published in this short span of years. This dissertation, however, focuses on a few representative texts: popular drama of the period, George Lippard's story paper The Quaker City, the journals and essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Pierre and Moby-Dick, two novels by Herman Melville.