Richard Gravil explores the relationship between works of the "American Renaissance, " in particular the works of the Transcendentalists, and British Romanticism, emphasizing the significance of the American Revolution to British writers and the role of Fenimore Cooper in the foundation of American literature. He focuses on the reception of Wordsworth and Coleridge by Emerson and Thoreau, Melville's reading of Coleridge and Whitman's transfiguration of Wordsworth, the response of Hawthorne and Poe to Coleridge and Keats, and the exceptional intertextuality of Emily Dickinson.