Suburban plots
Subtitle: men at home in nineteenth-century American print culture
By: Maura D'Amore
Series: Studies in print culture and history of the book
Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press
Published: 2014
Place of publication: Amherst
Language: eng
Number of pages: 199
ISBN-13: 9781625340955; 9781625340948
Subjects: Suburbs; History; Suburban life; Men; Books and reading; American literature; History and criticism; Men in literature; Suburbs in literature; Suburban life in literature
Other titles: Men at home in nineteenth-century American print culture
Description: "In the middle of nineteenth century, as Americans contended with rapid industrial and technological change, readers relied on periodicals and books for information about their changing world. Within this print culture, a host of writers, editors, architects, and reformers urged men to commute to and from their jobs in the city, which was commonly associated with overcrowding, disease, and expense. Through a range of materials, from pattern books to novels and a variety of periodicals, men were told of the restorative effects on body and soul of the natural environment, found in the emerging suburbs outside cities such as New York, Boston, and Philadelphia. They were assured that the promise of an ideal home, despite its association with women's work, could help to motivate them to engage in the labor and commute that took them away from it each day. In Suburban Plots, Maura D'Amore explores how Henry David Thoreau, Henry Ward Beecher, Donald Grant Mitchell, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Nathaniel Parker Willis, and others utilized the pen to plot opportunities for a new sort of male agency grounded, literarily and spatially, in a suburbanized domestic landscape. D'Amore uncovers surprising narratives that do not fit easily into standard critical accounts of midcentury home life. Taking men out of work spaces and locating them in the domestic sphere, these writers were involved in a complex process of portraying men struggling to fulfill fantasies outside of their professional lives, in newly emerging communities. These representations established the groundwork for popular conceptions of suburban domestic life that remain today" --
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (pages 177-188) and index.
Table of contents: title: Introduction: colonizing the countryside, plotting the suburbs; title: Thoreau's unreal estate: playing house at Walden Pond; title: "To build, as trees grow, season by season": Henry Ward Beecher's domestic organicism; title: "A man's sense of domesticity": Donald Grant Mitchell's home relish; title: Advancement and association, nostalgia and exclusion: Hawthorne and the suburban romance; title: A networked wilderness of print: textual suburbanization in Hillis's Home journal; title: Speculative manhood: living fiction in the country-book genre; title: Afterword: suburban nostalgia, then and now.