Annotation
An examination of the practitioners of the American romance tradition who built upon the distinction, made by Emerson (and repeated by Nathaniel Hawthorne), between "romances" and "fictions" (novels), including short fictions, hypernomian excursions, by Hawthorne and Melville subversive in various ways of fixed or external standards or hierarchies of value, and which offer, instead, examples of the creative nihilism and nonconformist self- and value-construction characteristic of the "shifting world," the mental universe, of the American Renaissance.