Philadelphia stories : America's literature of race and freedom Samuel Otter

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Otter, Samuel, 1956-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

American literature--Pennsylvania--Philadelphia--History and criticism.

American literature.

Literature and history.

American literature--19th century--History and criticism.

Philadelphia (Pa.)--History--19th century.

Philadelphia (Pa.).

Philadelphia (Pa.)--In literature.

Physical Description:

xii, 396 pages : illustrations ; 25 cm

Place of Publication:

New York : Oxford University Press, 2010.

Summary:

Samuel Otter's authoritative study considers the significance of geographical, social, and literary "place." It offers a model for thinking about the relationships between literature and history and among European American and African American writers. It challenges conventional narratives of American literary history. And finally, it establishes Philadelphia as fundamental to our understanding of not only the political but also the imaginative life of nineteenth-century America.

Contents:

Mathew Carey, Absalom Jones, Richard Allen, and the color of fever

Ministers and criminals: Richard Allen, John Joyce, and Peter Matthias

Benjamin Rush's heroic interventions

Mathew Carey's fugitive Philadelphians

Charles Brockden Brown's experiments in character

Hugh Henry Brackenridge, and the irrepressible teague

Edward W. Clay's "Life in Philadelphia"

"The rage for profiles": silhouettes at Peale's Museum

Philadelphia metempsychosis in Robert Montgomery Bird's Sheppard Lee

The peculiar position of our people

William Whipper and debates in the black conventions

Disfranchisement and appeal

Joseph Willson's higher classes of colored society in Philadelphia

"Doomed to destruction": the history of Pennsylvania hall

The portraiture of the city of Philadelphia, and Henry James's American scene the mysteries of the city: George Lippard, Edgar Allan Poe

The fiction of riot: George Lippard, John Beauchamp Jones

The condition of the free people of color

The struggle over "Philadelphia": Mary Howard Schoolcraft, Sara Josepha

Hale, Martin Robison Delany, William Whipper and James McCune Smith

Whipper Frank J. Webb's the garies and their friends "A rather curious protest"

Still life in Georgia

History and farce

Parlor and riot

Philadelphia vanitas

The social experiment in Herman Melville's Benito Cereno.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780195395921

0195395921

9780199970964

0199970963

OCLC:

427704498