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The fabrication of American literature [[electronic resource] ] : fraudulence and antebellum print culture / / Lara Langer Cohen



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Autore: Cohen Lara Langer Visualizza persona
Titolo: The fabrication of American literature [[electronic resource] ] : fraudulence and antebellum print culture / / Lara Langer Cohen Visualizza cluster
Pubblicazione: Philadelphia, : University of Pennsylvania Press, c2012
Edizione: 1st ed.
Descrizione fisica: 1 online resource (252 p.)
Disciplina: 810.9/003
Soggetto topico: American literature - 1783-1850 - History and criticism
Truthfulness and falsehood in literature
Fraud in literature
Soggetto non controllato: Cultural Studies
Literature
Note generali: Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph
Nota di bibliografia: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Nota di contenuto: Front matter -- Contents -- 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
Sommario/riassunto: 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.
Titolo autorizzato: The fabrication of American literature  Visualizza cluster
ISBN: 1-283-89117-4
0-8122-0519-7
Formato: Materiale a stampa
Livello bibliografico Monografia
Lingua di pubblicazione: Inglese
Record Nr.: 9910788669403321
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Serie: Material texts.