Lara Langer Cohen

The Fabrication of American Literature (eBook, ePUB)

Fraudulence and Antebellum Print Culture

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

Literary histories typically celebrate the antebellum period as marking the triumphant emergence of American literature. But the period's readers and writers tell a different story: they derided literature as a fraud, an imposture, and a humbug, and they likened it to inflated currency, land bubbles, and quack medicine.

Excavating a rich archive of magazine fiction, verse satires, comic almanacs, false slave narratives, minstrel song sheets, and early literary criticism, and revisiting such familiar figures as Edgar Allan Poe, Davy Crockett, Fanny Fern, and Herman Melville, Lara Langer Cohen uncovers the controversies over literary fraudulence that plagued these years and uses them to offer an ambitious rethinking of the antebellum print explosion. She traces the checkered fortunes of American literature from the rise of literary nationalism, which was beset by accusations of puffery, to the conversion of fraudulence from a national dilemma into a sorting mechanism that produced new racial, regional, and gender identities. Yet she also shows that even as fraudulence became a sign of marginality, some authors managed to turn their dubious reputations to account, making a virtue of their counterfeit status. This forgotten history, Cohen argues, presents a dramatically altered picture of American literature's role in antebellum culture, one in which its authority is far from assured, and its failures matter as much as its achievements.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: University of Pittsburgh Press
• Seitenzahl: 256
• Erscheinungstermin: 29. November 2011
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9780812205190
• Artikelnr.: 38231871

Autorenporträt

Lara Langer Cohen

Inhaltsangabe

Introduction: American Literary Fraudulence
Chapter 1. "One Vast Perambulating Humbug": Literary Nationalism and the
Rise of the Puffing System
Chapter 2. Backwoods and Blackface: The Strange Careers of Davy Crockett
and Jim Crow
Chapter 3. "Slavery Never Can Be Represented": James Williams and the
Racial Politics of Imposture
Chapter 4. Mediums of Exchange: Fanny Fern's Unoriginality
Conclusion: The Confidence Man on a Large Scale
Notes
Works Cited
Index
Acknowledgments