A01=Nicholas K. Bromell
Author_Nicholas K. Bromell
Category=DSB
Category=JHBL
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
Product details
- ISBN 9780226075549
- Weight: 567g
- Dimensions: 16 x 24mm
- Publication Date: 03 Feb 1994
- Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
Secure
checkout
Fast Shipping
Easy returns
The spread of industrialism, the emergence of professionalism, the challenge to slavery - these and other developments fuelled an anxious debate about work in antebellum America. Nicholas Bromell discusses the ways in which American writers participated in this cultural contestation of the nature and meaning of work. In chapters on Thoreau, Melville, Hawthorne, Rebecca Harding Davis, Susan Warner, Harriet Beecher Stowe and Frederick Douglass, Bromell shows how writers scrutinized work and reflected upon its relation to their own work of writing. Bromell argues that American writers sensed a deep affinity between the mental labour of writing and such bodily labours as blacksmithing, mothering and growing crops. He also contributes to 19th-century social history by examining opinions on the nature of maternity, ideological efforts to devalue skilled labour, and the paradoxical idea that slaves sometimes found in their labour a mode of self-actualization within slavery. Combining canonical and noncanonical texts, primary source material and contemporary theory, "By the Sweat of the Brow" establishes work as an important subject of cultural criticism.
