This study examines the rhetorical creations of "democratic," literary readers in nineteenth-century book prefaces by Catharine Sedgwick, James Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Louisa May Alcott, Harriet Beecher Stowe and Frederick Douglass. Though diverse, these writers shared a cultural need to envision a serious, literary reader who embodied, nonetheless, the ideals of popular sanction, democratic politics and marketplace culture. Through appeals to the extrapolitical authorities of nationalism, Common Sense, self-culture, domesticity, social reform and commercial popularity, these writers used the partly fictive, partly social discourse of the preface to bridge a gap between their emergent, sense of literary professionalism and the American myth of popular authority--a cultural divide that, in the twentieth century, would be institutionalized in the separation of middlebrow and highbrow cultures. / While many of these nineteenth-century writers and books were commercial and artistic successes in their days, they ultimately failed to establish, once and for all, a viable, unitary tradition of popular, literary reading in the United States. These prefaces still demand the attention of American writers, scholars and teachers, however, for the very reason that these rhetorical tactics more comprehensively define, in their diverse failures, the ongoing cultural challenges of authorizing oneself in a democratic society than they might in some mythic, all-unifying narrative of success. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 55-09, Section: A, page: 2835. / Major Professor: Jerome Stern. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1994.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:fsu.edu/oai:fsu.digital.flvc.org:fsu_77262 |
| Contributors | Stroupe, Harry Craig., Florida State University |
| Source Sets | Florida State University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text |
| Format | 492 p. |
| Rights | On campus use only. |
| Relation | Dissertation Abstracts International |
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