Slavery, Philosophy, and American Literature, 1830–1860

Maurice Lee, in this 2005 book, demonstrates how the slavery crisis became a crisis of philosophy. Poe, Stowe, Douglass, Melville, and Emerson tried - and failed - to find rational solutions to the slavery conflict. Drawing on antebellum moral philosophy, political theory, and metaphysics, Lee brings a different perspective to the literature of slavery.