America's sketchbook
Subtitle: the cultural life of a nineteenth-century literary genre
By: Kristie Hamilton.
Publisher: Ohio University Press
Published: 1998
Place of publication: Athens
Language: eng
Number of pages: 190
Subjects: American prose literature -- 19th century -- History and criticism.; Literature and society -- United States -- History -- 19th century.; Popular literature -- United States -- History and criticism.; Books and reading -- United States -- History -- 19th century.; American essays -- 19th century -- History and criticism.; Description (Rhetoric) -- History -- 19th century.; Short stories, American -- History and criticism.; Literary form -- History -- 19th century.; Realism in literature.; Aesthetics, American.; United States -- Civilization -- 19th century.
Description: America's Sketchbook recaptures the drama of nineteenth-century American cultural life, placing at its center a genre - the literary sketch - more available and formally accessible than the novel, less governable by the critical establishment, and shot through with the tensions and types of local and national culture-making.

In the first Golden Age of magazines (1820-1860), the brief, open form of the sketch seized the attention of a new mass audience, readers of magazines as well as of books, and authors as diverse as Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Fanny Fern, Edgar Allan Poe, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Caroline M. Kirkland, Harriet E. Wilson, Herman Melville, and Sarah Bagley. It became a vigorous force in the democratization of American literature.

In her comprehensive study of American sketch writing, Kristic Hamilton gives new insight into the powers of mass-market intimacy more personal and home-like than home - and into leisure, which as a component of middle-class identity is quite as imperative in its achievement as disciplined morality. Here, also, is a more complex story of the aesthetic, as a class-inflected realm, in which factory women and rural and urban middle-class authors debate the shape of literature and life.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 171-180) and index.