- English
- PDF
- Available on iOS & Android
Fictions of Mass Democracy in Nineteenth-Century America
About This Book
Fictions of Mass Democracy in Nineteenth-Century America examines how mass democracy was understood before public opinion could be measured by polls. It argues that fiction, in its freedom to represent what resists representation, develops the most groundbreaking theories of the democratic public. These literary accounts of democracy focus less on overt pubic action than the profound effects of everyday social encounters. This book thus departs from recent scholarship, which emphasizes the responsibilities of citizenship and the achievements of oppositional social movements. It demonstrates how novels and stories by Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Fanny Fern, Harriet Jacobs and James Fenimore Cooper attempt to understand a public organized not only by explicitly political discourse, but by informal and disorganized social networks.
Frequently asked questions
Information
Table of contents
- Cover
- Half-title
- Series information
- Title page
- Copyright information
- Dedication
- Table of contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: The Public before Polling
- 1 Network Theory Circa 1800
- 2 Gossip in the Age of Print
- 3 The Peopleās Curse
- 4 Publics, Counterpublics, Networks
- 5 The Tyranny of Opinion
- Coda: The Public after Polling
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index