Democratic personality
Subtitle: popular voice and the trial of American authorship
By: Nancy Ruttenburg.
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 1998
Place of publication: Stanford, Calif
Language: eng
Number of pages: 537
Subjects: St. John de Crèvecoeur, J. Hector, 1735-1813.; American literature -- 19th century -- History and criticism.; Popular literature -- United States -- History and criticism.; National characteristics, American, in literature.; Authorship -- Political aspects -- United States.; Politics and literature -- United States.; Innocence (Psychology) in literature.; Democracy in literature.; Aesthetics, American.; Self in literature.
Description: This book proposes a new view of the democratization of America by recasting democracy as a symbolic theater, historically realized in an untheorized and irrational public utterance that began with the Salem witchcraft crisis of 1692 and extended through the Great Awakening and the antebellum era.

This discursive practice gave rise, as popular voice, to a distinctive mode of political and literary subjectivity, "democratic personality," which emerged without reference to the political-philosophical currents and attendant humanistic values that anticipated the formation of a liberal democratic society.

The author constructs a genealogy of democratic personality by examining the historical and, later, fictional theaters within which it emerged to redefine the relation of appearance to reality and thus challenge hierarchies of political and cultural power.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 499-526) and index.