Empire and the Literature of Sensation - An Anthology of Nineteenth-century Popular Fiction (Paperback)

Mid-nineteenth-century American literature teems with the energy and excitement characteristic of the nation's era of expansion. It also reveals the intense anxiety and conflict of a country struggling with what it will mean, socially and culturally, to incorporate previously held Spanish territories. Empire and the Literature of Sensation is a critical anthology of some of the most popular and sensational writings published before the Civil War. It is a collection of transvestite adventures, forbidden love, class conflict, and terrifying encounters with racial "others." Most of the accounts, although widely distributed in nineteenth-century newspapers, pamphlets, or as dime novels, have long been out of print. Reprinted here for the first time are novelettes by two superstars of the cheap fiction industry, Ned Buntline and George Lippard. Also included are selections from one of the first dime novels as well as the first-person narratives of Leonora Siddons and Sophia Delaplain, both of whom claim in their pamphlets to have cross-dressed as men and participated in the Texas rebellion and Cuban filibustering. Originally written for entertainment and enormously popular in their day, these sensational thrillers reveal for today's audiences how the rhetoric of empire was circulated for mass consumption and how imperialism generated domestic and cultural instability during the period of the American literary renaissance. Jesse Aleman is an associate professor of English at the University of New Mexico. He has published in a variety of journals and edited the reprint of Loreta Janeta Velazquez's The Woman in Battle. Shelley Streeby is an associate professor of literature at the University of California, San Diego. Her first book, American Sensations: Class, Empire, and the Production of Popular Culture, was awarded the American Studies Association's Lora Romero First Book Prize.

General

Imprint:	Rutgers University Press
Country of origin:	United States
Series:	Multi-Ethnic Literatures of the Americas (MELA)
Release date:	July 2007
First published:	July 2007
Editors:	Jesse Aleman • Shelley Streeby
Dimensions:	254 x 178 x 17mm (L x W x T)
Format:	Paperback
Pages:	320
ISBN-13:	978-0-8135-4076-4
Categories:	Books > Language & Literature > Literature: texts > Collections & anthologies of various literary forms Books > Fiction > General & literary fiction > General Books > Fiction > Special features > Classic fiction Promotions
LSN:	0-8135-4076-3
Barcode:	9780813540764

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