Empire and the literature of sensation : an anthology of nineteenth-century popular fiction / edited and with an introduction by Jesse Alemán and Shelley Streeby.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Alemán, Jesse, 1968-

Streeby, Shelley, 1963-

Series:

Multi-ethnic literatures of the Americas

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

American fiction--19th century.

American fiction.

Popular literature--United States.

Popular literature.

Imperialism--Fiction.

Imperialism.

Indigenous peoples.

America.

United States.

Indigenous peoples--America--Fiction.

Genre:

Fiction.

Physical Description:

xxxi, 297 pages ; 26 cm.

Place of Publication:

New Brunswick, N.J. : Rutgers University Press, [2007]

Summary:

Mid-nineteenth-century American literature teems with the energy and excitement characteristic of the nation's era of expansion. It also reveals the intense anxiety and conflict of a country struggling with what it will mean, socially and culturally, to incorporate previously held Spanish territories. Empire and the Literature of Sensation is a critical anthology of some of the most popular and sensational writings published before the Civil War. It is a collection of transvestite adventures, forbidden love, class conflict, and terrifying encounters with racial "others."

Most of the accounts, although widely distributed in nineteenth-century newspapers, pamphlets, or as dime novels, have long been out of print. Reprinted here for the first time are novelettes by two superstars of the cheap fiction industry, Ned Buntline and George Lippard. Also included are selections from one of the first dime novels as well as the first-person narratives of Leonora Siddons and Sophia Delaplain, both of whom claim in their pamphlets to have cross-dressed as men and participated in the Texas rebellion and Cuban filibustering. Originally written for entertainment and enormously popular in their day, these sensational thrillers reveal for today's audiences how the rhetoric of empire was circulated for mass consumption and how imperialism generated domestic and cultural instability during the period of the American literary renaissance.

Contents:

Introduction

A note on the texts

The female warrior

Magdalena, the beautiful Mexican maid / Ned Buntline

'Bel of Prairie Eden / George Lippard

A thrilling and exciting account of the sufferings and horrible tortures inflicted on Mortimer Bowers and Miss Sophia Delaplain

The prisoner of La Vintresse / Mary Andrews Denison.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 287-297).

ISBN:

9780813540757

0813540755

9780813540764

0813540763

OCLC:

76794864