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The Aesthetics and Politics of the Crowd in American Literature

The Aesthetics and Politics of the Crowd in American Literature

The Aesthetics and Politics of the Crowd in American Literature

Mary Esteve, Concordia University, Montréal
April 2003
Available
Hardback
9780521814881

    Mary Esteve provides a study of crowd representations in American literature from the antebellum era to the early twentieth century. As a central icon of political and cultural democracy, the crowd occupies a prominent place in the American literary and cultural landscape. Esteve examines a range of writing by Poe, Hawthorne, Lydia Maria Child, Du Bois, James, and Stephen Crane among others. These writers, she argues, distinguish between the aesthetics of immersion in a crowd and the mode of collectivity demanded of political-liberal subjects. In their representations of everyday crowds, ranging from streams of urban pedestrians to swarms of train travellers, from upper-class parties to lower-class revivalist meetings, such authors seize on the political problems facing a mass liberal democracy - problems such as the stipulations of citizenship, nation formation, mass immigration and the emergence of mass media. Esteve examines both the aesthetic and political meanings of such urban crowd scenes.

    • Covers a wide range of texts from 1840–1930
    • Treats both the aesthetic and political dimensions of crowd representation
    • The methodology combines close reading, theoretical analysis and historical contextualisation

    Reviews & endorsements

    "In this ambitious and erudite study, Mary Esteve successfully contends that any consideration of "the crowd" as a political force in American literary texts should not be undertaken without understanding the concomitant aesthetic function of the same." Studies in the Novel

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    Product details

    April 2003
    Hardback
    9780521814881
    274 pages
    229 × 152 × 19 mm
    0.566kg
    4 b/w illus.
    Available

    Table of Contents

    • List of illustrations
    • Acknowledgments
    • Introduction
    • 1. When travellers swarm forth: antebellum urban aesthetics and the contours of the political
    • 2. In 'the thick of the stream': Henry James and the public sphere
    • 3. A 'gorgeous neutrality': social justice and Stephen Crane's documentary anaesthetics
    • 4. Vicious gregariousness: white city, the nation form and the souls of lynched folk
    • 5. A 'moving mosaic': Harlem, primitivism and Nella Larsen's Quicksand
    • 6. Breaking the waves: mass immigration, trauma and ethno-political consciousness in Cahan, Yezierska and Roth
    • Notes
    • Bibliography
    • Index.
      Author
    • Mary Esteve , Concordia University, Montréal

      Mary Esteve is Assistant Professor in the English Department at Concordia University, Montréal. Her work has appeared in ELH, American Literary History, and Genre.