SOURCE: "Back Home Again in India: Hart Crane's 'The Bridge '," in Romantic Revolutions: Criticism and Theory, edited by Kenneth R Johnson, Gilbert Chaitin, Karen Hanson, and Herbert Marks, Indiana University Press, 1990, pp. 269-96.

In the following essay, Irwin focuses on the question of self and national origin in the "Indiana " section of The Bridge.

Several years ago I published a book called American Hieroglyphics, that dealt with the influence of the decipherment of the Egyptian hieroglyphics on the literature of the American Renaissance and used this rather specialized area of inquiry as a means of raising larger questions about the figuration of the self and the search for origins in that form of late romanticism that is nineteenth-century American symbolism. It is this question of origins and their figuration, as posed in the writings of the American Renaissance, that I would like to pursue here into twentieth-century...