The Fabrication of American Literature is popular PDF and ePub book, written by Lara Langer Cohen in 2011-11-29, it is a fantastic choice for those who relish reading online the Literary Criticism genre. Let's immerse ourselves in this engaging Literary Criticism book by exploring the summary and details provided below. Remember, The Fabrication of American Literature can be Read Online from any device for your convenience.
The Fabrication of American Literature Book PDF Summary
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.
Detail Book of The Fabrication of American Literature PDF
- Author : Lara Langer Cohen
- Release : 29 November 2011
- Publisher : University of Pennsylvania Press
- ISBN : 9780812205190
- Genre : Literary Criticism
- Total Page : 252 pages
- Language : English
- PDF File Size : 11,9 Mb
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