Dr. Scott Reznick

Scott Reznick specializes in nineteenth-century American literature and is particularly interested in the intersections between literature, political philosophy, and cultural history. His work has appeared in Early American Literature; ESQ: A Journal of Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture; Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory; and American Political Thought. His first book, The Vision of Principles: Political Liberalism and the Rise of the American Literary Romantic Tradition (under contract with Oxford University Press), re-frames the political dimensions of U.S. literature by exploring how the advent of Romanticism in the United States was fundamentally intertwined with U.S. writers’ deep-seated concerns about the widespread moral disagreement over the very nature of democracy. Engaging with writers ranging from Charles Brockden Brown, Robert Montgomery Bird, and James Fenimore Cooper to Harriet Beecher Stowe, Frederick Douglass, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Vision of Principles demonstrates how U.S. authors, drawing on and interrogating the Romantic imagination in the face of widespread conflict and strife, purposefully contributed to the tradition of political liberalism as they sought to understand the nature of moral belief and how individuals beholden to a number of different and divergent convictions might nevertheless share a political society.