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Record Nr. |
UNINA9910524844103321 |
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Autore |
Watts Steven <1952-> |
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Titolo |
The Romance of Real Life : Charles Brockden Brown and the Origins of American Culture / / Steven Watts |
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Pubbl/distr/stampa |
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Johns Hopkins University Press |
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ISBN |
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Descrizione fisica |
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1 online resource (1 online resource (xviii, 246 pages)) |
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Disciplina |
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Soggetti |
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Cultuur |
Romanticism |
Novelists, American |
National characteristics, American, in literature |
Civilization |
Authorship |
Authors and readers |
Romanticism - United States |
Authorship - History - 18th century |
Novelists, American - 18th century |
Authors and readers - United States - History - 18th century |
History |
Biographies. |
Electronic books. |
United States |
United States Civilization 1783-1865 |
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Lingua di pubblicazione |
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Formato |
Materiale a stampa |
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Livello bibliografico |
Monografia |
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Note generali |
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Open access edition supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities / Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Humanities Open Book Program. |
The text of this book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License |
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Nota di bibliografia |
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Includes bibliographical references (pages 225-241) and index. |
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Nota di contenuto |
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1. The Novel and the Market in the Early Republic -- 2. The Lawyer and the Rhapsodist -- 3. The Young Artist as Social Visionary -- 4. The |
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Major Novels (I): Fiction and Fragmentation -- 5. The Major Novels (II): Deception and Disintegration -- 6. The Writer as Bourgeois Moralist -- 7. The Writer and the Liberal Ego. |
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Sommario/riassunto |
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The Romance of Real Life shows how a sensitive, prolific writer confronted, wrestled with, and ultimately promoted the emergence of a liberal society in nineteenth-century America. |
Watts also shows how Brown's experience was central to broader developments: the rise of the novel in America, the development of gender and family formulations, the clash between republican "virtue" and liberal "self-interest," and the origins of a bourgeois creed of self-control. Perhaps most importantly, he explains how Brown helped articulate a notion of "culture" itself as a civilizing force to restrain restless liberal individualism. |
His notoriously volatile private life, it turns out, in many ways flowed from a critique of market society and its impulses. |
Offering a revisionist view of Brown himself, Watts examines the major novels of the 1790s as well as previously neglected sources - from early essays and private letters to late-career forays into journalism, political pamphleteering, serial fiction, and cultural criticism. The result is a fuller picture of Brown as a man of letters in post-Revolutionary America, a man who rigorously analyzed the public and private vagaries of individual agency. |
Among the leading writers of the early republic, Charles Brockden Brown often appears as a romantic prototype - the brilliant, alienated author rejected by a utilitarian, materialistic American society. In The Romance of Real Life Steven Watts reinterprets Brown's life and work as a complex case study in the emerging culture of capitalism at the dawn of the nineteenth century. |
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