The Fabrication of American Literature

The Fabrication of American Literature
Author :
Publisher : University of Pennsylvania Press
Total Pages : 252
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9780812205190
ISBN-13 : 0812205197
Rating : 4/5 (90 Downloads)

Book Synopsis The Fabrication of American Literature by : Lara Langer Cohen

Download or read book The Fabrication of American Literature written by Lara Langer Cohen and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2011-11-29 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.


The Fabrication of American Literature Related Books

The Fabrication of American Literature
Language: en
Pages: 252
Authors: Lara Langer Cohen
Categories: Literary Criticism
Type: BOOK - Published: 2011-11-29 - Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Literary histories typically celebrate the antebellum period as marking the triumphant emergence of American literature. But the period's readers and writers te
American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 1834-1853
Language: en
Pages: 380
Authors: Meredith L. McGill
Categories: Language Arts & Disciplines
Type: BOOK - Published: 2003 - Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

"A major study of Jacksonian print culture that should be required reading."--"American Studies"
Early African American Print Culture
Language: en
Pages: 432
Authors: Lara Langer Cohen
Categories: Literary Criticism
Type: BOOK - Published: 2012-09-06 - Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries saw both the consolidation of American print culture and the establishment of an African American literary tradition, ye
Playing in the Dark
Language: en
Pages: 86
Authors: Toni Morrison
Categories: Literary Criticism
Type: BOOK - Published: 2007-07-24 - Publisher: Vintage

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

An immensely persuasive work of literary criticism that opens a new chapter in the American dialogue on raceā€”and promises to change the way we read American l
The Fabrication of Louis XIV
Language: en
Pages: 260
Authors: Peter Burke
Categories: Political Science
Type: BOOK - Published: 1994-01-01 - Publisher: Yale University Press

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Louis XIV was a man like any other, but the money and attention lavished on his public image by the French government transformed him into a godlike figure. In