The Genuine Article - Race, Mass Culture, and American Literary Manhood

"Richly informative and conceptually sophisticated, Paul Gilmore's book argues that antebellum white male writers appropriated racialized body images from mass culture to market their antimarket manhood. Gilmore shows how unstable images of raced authenticity helped to stabilize literary manhood's 'impossible ideal,' to be in and above market culture."--David Leverenz, University of Florida

List of contents

Illustrations
>
Acknowledgments
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Introduction

Prologue: Staging Manhood, Writing Manhood: Cultural Authority and the Indian Body

2. The Indian in the Museum: Henry David Thoreau, Okah Tubbee, and Authentic Manhood

3. A “Rara Avis in Terris”: Poe’s “Hop-Frog” and Race in the Antebellum Freak Show

4. Inward Criminality and the Shadow of Race: The House of the Seven Gables and Daguerreotypy

Daguerreotypy

Epilogue: Electric Chains

Notes
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Bibliography
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Index

About the author

Paul Gilmore

Summary

Examines the interdependence of literary and mass culture at a crucial moment in United States history. This book argues that these figures were manipulated, translated, and adopted not only by authors such as Hawthorne, Thoreau, Cooper, and Melville but also by African American and Native American writers like William Wells Brown and Okah Tubbee.

Product details

• Authors: GILMORE, Paul Gilmore, Paul Gilmore
• Publisher: Duke University Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 28.11.2001
• EAN: 9780822327547
• ISBN: 978-0-8223-2754-7
• No. of pages: 288
• Weight: 771 g
• Illustrations: 11 illustrations
• Series: New Americanists; New Americanists
• Subject: Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > English linguistics / literary studies