Ildikó Limpár

The American Dream Reconsidered: New World Motifs in Shakespeare¿s the Tempest and Their Transformations in American Literature Ildikó Limpár

The American Dream Reconsidered addresses readers of Shakespearean and American literature alike. This study aims to re-position William Shakespeare's The Tempest in world literature, using and re-interpreting Leo Marx's thesis that The Tempest may be considered "a prologue to American literature." Focusing on The Tempest in the first half of her work, the author points out novel aspects of the play that may be connected to the European experience of the New World, prefiguring even the concept of the later American dream. The chapters that follow the analysis of the Shakespearean play take a glimpse at American literary history and outline how the previously examined three major components¿time, nature and magic¿appear in the American literary heritage up to the present. The examples presented are by authors from Washington Irving to Sandra Cisneros, and include a profound analysis of Linda Hogan's Power, the novel that, as Limpár argues, indicates the start of a new process in American literature by opposing the intense myth destruction of the past two centuries and re-creating the myth.