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Fictions of Mass Democracy in Nineteenth-Century America

Fictions of Mass Democracy in Nineteenth-Century America

Hardcover

Series: Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture, Book 173

Literary Criticism

ISBN10: 1107107806
ISBN13: 9781107107809
Publisher: Cambridge
Published: Jul 23 2015
Pages: 226
Weight: 0.95
Height: 1.80 Width: 6.40 Depth: 9.50
Language: English
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.

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Literary Criticism