The Aesthetics and Politics of the Crowd in American Literature
- 27 February 2003
- book
- Published by Cambridge University Press (CUP)
Abstract
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.Keywords
This publication has 67 references indexed in Scilit:
- Citizen Hester: The Scarlet Letter as Civic MythAmerican Literary History, 2001
- Du Bois and Wagner: Race, Nation, and Culture between the United States and GermanyThe German Quarterly, 1997
- T.S. Eliot Meets Michael Gold: Modernism and Radicalism in Depression-Era American LiteratureModernism/modernity, 1996
- The Doctor's Order: Eugenic Anxiety in Henry James's Washington SquareLiterature and Medicine, 1996
- Democracy and the "Sovereign Crowd" In Pre-World War I American MagazinesThe Journal of American Culture, 1992
- The Aesthetics of Race and Gender in Nella Larsen'sQuicksandPMLA/Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, 1990
- Statistical Personsdiacritics, 1987
- Words and Deeds in The Princess CasamassimaELH, 1970
- The Transcendentalists: An AnthologyThe American Historical Review, 1950
- THE HISTORY OF SURGICAL ANESTHESIAThe Lancet Healthy Longevity, 1945