Fictions of Mass Democracy in Nineteenth-Century America

Fictions of Mass Democracy in Nineteenth-Century America PDF Author: Stacey Margolis
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316381366
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
Fictions of Mass Democracy in Nineteenth-Century America examines how mass democracy was understood before public opinion could be measured by polls. It argues that fiction, in its freedom to represent what resists representation, develops the most groundbreaking theories of the democratic public. These literary accounts of democracy focus less on overt pubic action than the profound effects of everyday social encounters. This book thus departs from recent scholarship, which emphasizes the responsibilities of citizenship and the achievements of oppositional social movements. It demonstrates how novels and stories by Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Fanny Fern, Harriet Jacobs and James Fenimore Cooper attempt to understand a public organized not only by explicitly political discourse, but by informal and disorganized social networks.

Fictions of Mass Democracy in Nineteenth-Century America

Fictions of Mass Democracy in Nineteenth-Century America PDF Author: Stacey Margolis
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316381366
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 225

Get Book Here

Book Description
Fictions of Mass Democracy in Nineteenth-Century America examines how mass democracy was understood before public opinion could be measured by polls. It argues that fiction, in its freedom to represent what resists representation, develops the most groundbreaking theories of the democratic public. These literary accounts of democracy focus less on overt pubic action than the profound effects of everyday social encounters. This book thus departs from recent scholarship, which emphasizes the responsibilities of citizenship and the achievements of oppositional social movements. It demonstrates how novels and stories by Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Fanny Fern, Harriet Jacobs and James Fenimore Cooper attempt to understand a public organized not only by explicitly political discourse, but by informal and disorganized social networks.

Fictions of Mass Democracy in Nineteenth-Century America

Fictions of Mass Democracy in Nineteenth-Century America PDF Author: Stacey Margolis
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107107806
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
This book examines how mass democracy was understood before public opinion could be measured by polls. It demonstrates how novels by Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Fanny Fern, Harriet Jacobs, and James Fenimore Cooper attempt to understand a public organized by political discourse and informal social networks.

Rude Republic

Rude Republic PDF Author: Glenn C. Altschuler
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 9780691089867
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 338

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Book Description
In this look at Americans and their politics, the authors argue for a more complex understanding of the space occupied by politics in 19th-century American society and culture.

Postwar American Fiction and the Rise of Modern Conservatism

Postwar American Fiction and the Rise of Modern Conservatism PDF Author: Bryan M. Santin
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108832652
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 307

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Book Description
Shows how shifting views on race caused the American conservative movement to surrender highbrow fiction to to progressive liberals.

Black Women and Energies of Resistance in Nineteenth-Century Haitian and American Literature

Black Women and Energies of Resistance in Nineteenth-Century Haitian and American Literature PDF Author: Mary Grace Albanese
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009314254
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 207

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Book Description
Black Women and Energies of Resistance in Nineteenth-Century Haitian and American Literature intervenes in traditional narratives of 19th-century American modernity by situating Black women at the center of an increasingly connected world. While traditional accounts of modernity have emphasized advancements in communication technologies, animal and fossil fuel extraction, and the rise of urban centers, Mary Grace Albanese proposes that women of African descent combated these often violent regimes through diasporic spiritual beliefs and practices, including spiritual possession, rootwork, midwifery, mesmerism, prophecy, and wandering. It shows how these energetic acts of resistance were carried out on scales large and small: from the constrained corners of the garden plot to the expansive circuits of global migration. By examining the concept of energy from narratives of technological progress, capital accrual and global expansion, this book uncovers new stories that center Black women at the heart of a pulsating, revolutionary world.

Democratic Dissent & the Cultural Fictions of Antebellum America

Democratic Dissent & the Cultural Fictions of Antebellum America PDF Author: Stephen J. Hartnett
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 9780252027222
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 252

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Book Description
"Drawing on a rich array of persuasive materials - including speeches and debates, novels and poems, newspaper articles and advertisements, daguerreotypes and paintings, protest pamphlets, reform manifestos, and scientific reports - Hartnett investigates how cultural fictions were presented, how they reflected or exploited larger cultural norms, and why some were more persuasive than others."--BOOK JACKET.

Nineteenth-Century American Literature and the Discourse of Natural History

Nineteenth-Century American Literature and the Discourse of Natural History PDF Author: Juliana Chow
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108997503
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 239

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Book Description
Nineteenth-Century American Literature and the Discourse of Natural History illuminates how literary experimentation with natural history provides penumbral views of environmental survival. The book brings together feminist revisions of scientific objectivity and critical race theory on diaspora to show how biogeography influenced material and metaphorical concepts of species and race. It also highlights how lesser known writers of color like Simon Pokagon and James McCune Smith connected species migration and mutability to forms of racial uplift. The book situates these literary visions of environmental fragility and survival amidst the development of Darwinian theories of evolution and against a westward expanding American settler colonialism.

Nineteenth-Century American Literature and the Long Civil War

Nineteenth-Century American Literature and the Long Civil War PDF Author: Cody Marrs
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107109833
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 207

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Book Description
Nineteenth-century American literature is often divided into two asymmetrical halves, neatly separated by the Civil War. Focusing on the later writings of Walt Whitman, Frederick Douglass, Herman Melville, and Emily Dickinson, this book shows how the war took shape across the nineteenth century, inflecting literary forms for decades after 1865.

Rethinking Sympathy and Human Contact in Nineteenth-Century American Literature

Rethinking Sympathy and Human Contact in Nineteenth-Century American Literature PDF Author: Marianne Noble
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108481337
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 306

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Book Description
The book analyzes the evolution of antebellum literary explorations of sympathy and human contact in the 1850s and 1860s. It will appeal to undergraduates and scholars seeking new approaches to canonical American authors, psychological theorists of sympathy and empathy, and philosophers of moral philosophy.

American Literary Misfits

American Literary Misfits PDF Author: D. Berton Emerson
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469678411
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 171

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Book Description
The study of nineteenth-century American literature has long been tied up with the study of American democracy. Just as some regions in the United States are elevated to stand in for the whole nation—New England is a good example—D. Berton Emerson argues the same is true for American literature of the nineteenth century; a few canonical texts overrepresent the more motley history of American letters. Emerson examines an eclectic group of literary texts that have rarely, if ever, been considered representative of "the nation" because of their unseemly characters or plots, divergence from dominant literary trends of the era, or local particularity. These are his "literary misfits," authors and texts that show different forms of egalitarianism in action that existed outside and even against the dominant liberal narratives of American democracy. Emerson's unique contribution is revealing these texts and the people they represent as rich with political knowledge. This knowledge, he argues, finds its most potent expression in the local. Such texts show us a different kind of democratic politics: one that is egalitarian, disorderly, and radical rather than homogeneous.