Fictions of Mass Democracy in Nineteenth-Century America

This book examines how mass democracy was understood before public opinion could be measured by polls.

Stacey Margolis (Author)

9781107107809, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 23 July 2015

226 pages
24.1 x 16.3 x 4.6 cm, 0.44 kg

'Historically rigorous, formally astute, and theoretically provocative … assuredly will shape discussions surrounding democracy's place in nineteenth-century US literature and culture in the years to come.' John Funchion, American Literature

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.

1. Network theory circa 1800: Charles Brockden Brown's Arthur Mervyn
2. Gossip in the age of print: Poe's crowdsourcing
3. The people's curse: Hawthorne's network theory of power
4. Publics, counterpublics, networks: the viral complaint of Melville, Fern, and Jacobs
5. The tyranny of opinion: Cooper's The Ways of the Hour.

Subject Areas: Political structure & processes [JPH], History of the Americas [HBJK], Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers [DSK], Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900 [DSBF]