Democracy's spectacle
Subtitle: sovereignty and public life in antebellum American writing
By: Jennifer Greiman
Edition: 1st ed.
Publisher: Fordham University Press
Published: 2010
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 276
ISBN-13: 9780823230990
Description: "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.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. [255]-270) and index.
Table of contents: title: "The thing is new": sovereignty and slavery in Democracy in America; title: Color, race, and the spectacle of opinion in Beaumont's Marie; title: "The hangman's accomplice": spectacle and complicity in Lydia Maria Child's New York; title: The spectacle of reform: theater and prison in Hawthorne's Blithedale romance; title: Theatricality, strangeness, and democracy in Melville's Confidence-man.