American crises: Paine, Hawthorne, Thoreau

Taking as my point of departure Emanuel Leutze’s 1851 monumental canvas Washington Crossing the Delaware, in this article I discuss the ways in which the event depicted in Leutze’s iconic painting relates to the publication of Thomas Paine’s influential pamphlet The American Crisis, No. 1 (1776). Then, I examine how from the 1770s on the concept of “crisis” becomes what the German historian Reinhart Koselleck has called “a structural signature of modernity”. Finally, I turn my attention to two scenes – the first from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850) and the second from Henry David Thoreau’s Walden (1854) – in which both of these American Renaissance writers describe some moments of crisis and reflect on the transformative potential of critical situations for human beings.

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