- Description
- 1 online resource (226 pages) : digital, PDF file(s).
- Summary
- 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.
- Series Statement
- Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture ; 173
- Uniform Title
- Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture ; 173.
- Subject
- Note
- Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 16 May 2016).
- OCLC
- CR9781316256602
- Author
Margolis, Stacey, author.
- Title
Fictions of Mass Democracy in Nineteenth-Century America / Stacey Margolis.
- Publisher
Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2015.
- Type of Content
text
- Type of Medium
computer
- Type of Carrier
online resource
- Series
Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture ; 173
Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture ; 173.
- Connect to:
- Other Form:
Print version: 9781107107809