Actions for Democracy's spectacle : sovereignty and public life in antebellum American writing

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Democracy's spectacle : sovereignty and public life in antebellum American writing / Jennifer Greiman

Author
Greiman, Jennifer
Published
New York : Fordham University Press, 2010.
Edition
1st ed.
Physical Description
xi, 276 pages ; 24 cm

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Contents
1. "The thing is new" : sovereignty and slavery in Democracy in America -- 2. Color, race, and the spectacle of opinion in Beaumont's Marie -- 3. "The hangman's accomplice" : spectacle and complicity in Lydia Maria Child's New York -- 4. The spectacle of reform : theater and prison in Hawthorne's Blithedale romance -- 5. Theatricality, strangeness, and democracy in Melville's Confidence-man.
Summary
"Drawing on Alexis de Tocqueville's analysis of the sovereignty of the people in Democracy in America, along with work by Gustave de Beaumont, Lydia Maria Child, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville, Greiman tracks the crises of sovereign power as it migrates out of the state to become a constitutive feature of the public sphere. Greiman brings together literature and political theory, as well as materials on antebellum performance culture, antislavery activism, and penitentiary reform, to argue that the antebellum public sphere, transformed by its empowerment, emerges as a spectacle with investments in both punishment and entertainment."--BOOK JACKET.
Subject(s)
ISBN
9780823230990 (cloth : alk. paper)
0823230996 (cloth : alk. paper)
Bibliography Note
Includes bibliographical references and index.
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