Novels, Readers, and Reviewers: Responses to Fiction in Antebellum America. Nina BaymThe American Narcissus: Individualism and Women in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction. Joyce W. Warren

Signs ◽  
1986 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 181-184
Author(s):  
Joanne Dobson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
American Fiction ◽  
Antebellum America

Prologue

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jason Phillips
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Antebellum America ◽  
Women Slaves ◽  
Military Planning ◽  
The Future ◽  
Future War

This introduction explains that looming, a nineteenth-century term for a superior mirage, shows us how visions of the future war affected antebellum America. First, some spark, an event or object, captured people’s attention. Second, a unique atmosphere elevated and enlarged that spark, making it loom greater than reality. Before the Civil War was fought or remembered, it was imagined by thousands of Americans who peered at the horizon through an apocalyptic atmosphere. Third, observers focused on it and reported what appeared to be beyond the horizon. Popular forecasts rose from leaders but also women, slaves, immigrants, and common soldiers. These imaginings shaped politics, military planning, and the economy. The prologue identifies the two prevailing temporalities of antebellum America, anticipations and expectations, and calls for more historical attention to the diverse temporalities of past people.

Variety of Attempt: British and American Fiction in the Early Nineteenth Century.

1977 ◽  
Vol 49 (2) ◽  
pp. 273
Author(s):  
J. Gerald Kennedy ◽  
Neal Frank Doubleday
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
American Fiction ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century

Poe

2018 ◽  
pp. 49-69
Author(s):  
Lesley Ginsberg
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Lyric Poetry ◽  
Letter Writing ◽  
Antebellum America ◽  
Nineteenth Century United States ◽  
Public Cultures ◽  
And Shifts ◽  
Performed Identities ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter approaches Poe’s life through his letters with reference to historical contexts that shaped letter writing in antebellum America, Poe’s interests in handwriting and “Autography,” the relationship between letter writing and antebellum authorship and celebrity, and shifts in Poe’s voice across multiple letters and recipients. In his letters, Poe performed identities ranging from the wronged son, the victim, the lover, and the literary genius. Poe’s epistolary “rhetoric of dread” may be linked to his lyric poetry. As scholars of letter writing in the nineteenth-century United States attest, letters were not “private documents.” Rather, they were “self-conscious” artifacts “circulating between friends and strangers.” Poe’s letters were written when the distinctions between privately circulated manuscripts and public cultures of print were destabilized. His letters to women are studied in this chapter as is the issue of poverty haunting his letters. Finally, Poe’s letters also document his desire for editorship of a magazine and his participation in the business of publishing in antebellum America.

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