Fictions of mass democracy in nineteenth-century America / Stacey Margolis, University of Utah.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Margolis, Stacey, 1966- author.

Series:

Cambridge studies in American literature and culture.

Cambridge studies in American literature and culture

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

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

American fiction.

Populism in literature.

Democracy in literature.

Public opinion in literature.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (xi, 211 pages) : digital, PDF file(s).

Place of Publication:

Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2015.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

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.

Contents:

1. Network theory circa 1800: Charles Brockden Brown's Arthur Mervyn; 2. Gossip in the age of print: Poe's crowdsourcing; 3. The people's curse: Hawthorne's network theory of power; 4. Publics, counterpublics, networks: the viral complaint of Melville, Fern, and Jacobs; 5. The tyranny of opinion: Cooper's The Ways of the Hour.

Notes:

Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 05 Oct 2015).

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

1-316-37956-6

1-316-38316-4

1-316-35916-6

1-316-36036-9

1-316-36096-2

1-316-35976-X

1-316-38496-9

1-316-25660-X