Cultures of Letters: Scenes of Reading and Writing in Nineteenth-Century America / Edition 1

by Richard H. Brodhead

Overview

Using a variety of historical sources, Richard H. Brodhead reconstructs the institutionalized literary worlds that coexisted in nineteenth-century America: the middle-class domestic culture of letters, the culture of mass-produced cheap reading, the militantly hierarchical high culture of post-emancipation black education. He describes how these socially structured worlds of writing shaped the terms of literary practice for writers like Stowe, Hawthorne, Fanny Fern, Louisa May Alcott, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Charles Chesnutt.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780226075266
Publisher:	University of Chicago Press
Publication date:	02/07/1995
Series:	Chicago Guides to Academic Life Ser.
Edition description:	1
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.80(d)

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction: On the Idea of Cultures of Letters
1: Sparing the Rod: Discipline and Fiction in Antebellum America
2: Veiled Ladies: Toward a History of Antebellum Entertainment
3: Starting Out in the 1860s: Alcott, Authorship, and the Postbellum
Literary Field
4: The Reading of Regions
For a History of Literary Access
The Reading of Regions: A Study in the Social Life of Forms
5: Jewett, Regionalism, and Writing as Women's Work
6: "Why Could Not a Colored Man?": Chesnutt and the Transaction of
Authorship
Notes
Index

Editorial Reviews

An elegant study--lean and clear--concerning the context of American writing and the significance of understanding, in the author's words, "the diverse and changing worlds that have been constructed around writing in American social life." Brodhead is head of the English department at Yale. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

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