This book analyzes literary representations of the American experience in selected works from Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman. Marek Paryz reveals the ambivalence underneath the cultural and political development of the United States as a recently independent former colony, on the one hand, and as a burgeoning imperial power on the other. With insight and precision, this study reaches beneath the surface of the political allegiances declared by these authors and the ideological stances contested by them to explore symbolic literary structures revolving around the figurations of dependence and expansion.