A01=D. Berton Emerson
African American print culture
Alexis de Tocqueville
alternative democracies
antebellum
Author_D. Berton Emerson
California Gold Rush
Caroline Kirkland
Category=DSBF
Category=JBSL
Category=JP
Category=NHK
common man
critical regionalism
democracy
Edgar Allan Poe
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
Frederick Douglass
George Bancroft
George Lippard
Harriet Beecher Stowe
Jacksonian era
James McCune Smith
John Rollin Ridge
Johnson Jones Hooper
literary misfits
literary nationalism
manifest destiny
Old Northwestern literature
Philadelphia Gothic
popular sovereignty
revolutionary memory
Robert Montgomery Bird
Southwestern Humor
the commons
vernacular aesthetics
Product details
- ISBN 9781469678399
- Weight: 272g
- Dimensions: 155 x 235mm
- Publication Date: 02 Apr 2024
- Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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The study of nineteenth-century American literature has long been tied up with the study of American democracy. Just as some regions in the United States are elevated to stand in for the whole nation—New England is a good example—D. Berton Emerson argues, the same is true for American literature of the nineteenth century; a few canonical texts overrepresent the more motley history of American letters. Emerson examines an eclectic group of literary texts that have rarely, if ever, been considered representative of "the nation" because of their unseemly characters or plots, divergence from dominant literary trends of the era, or local particularity. These are his "literary misfits," authors and texts that show different forms of egalitarianism in action that existed outside and even against the dominant liberal narratives of American democracy.
Emerson's unique contribution is revealing these texts, and the people they represent, as rich with political knowledge. This knowledge, he argues, finds its most potent expression in the local. Such texts show us a different kind of democratic politics: one that is egalitarian, disorderly, and radical rather than homogeneous.
Emerson's unique contribution is revealing these texts, and the people they represent, as rich with political knowledge. This knowledge, he argues, finds its most potent expression in the local. Such texts show us a different kind of democratic politics: one that is egalitarian, disorderly, and radical rather than homogeneous.
D. Berton Emerson is associate professor of English at Whitworth University.
