Late nineteenth-century America saw an explosion in mass
culture--from sensationalist tabloid newspapers to amusement parks
to Wild West shows. Historians and critics have traditionally
observed the advent of mass culture as undermining literature's
central role in the public sphere. Literary writers of the time
either reacted with a public show of disdain or retreated to
conduct their own private experiments in style and form. In
"Frantic Panoramas," Nancy Bentley questions these narratives of
opposition.For literary writers, Bentley explains, the
confrontation with mass culture was less a retreat than a
transformation, an ordeal through which habits of contemplative
appreciation could be refashioned into new forms of critical
thought. By grappling with the energies that marked mass culture,
authors came to recognize kinds of human experience that were only
then becoming visible as public. William Dean Howells shaped the
plots of his novels around tabloid events like rail and trolley
accidents and the public chaos of apartment house fires. Although
Henry James was distressed at the way dime fiction had changed the
very definition of literature, his meditations on mass culture led
him to reimagine the novel as a collective "workshop" in which
authors and readers jointly discovered new meaning. Bentley offers
close readings of these and other writers such as Edith Wharton,
James Weldon Johnson, Pauline Hopkins, and Gertrude Bonnin to
demonstrate how leading artists took inspiration from commercial
culture to create new and distinct literary forms.Drawing on
original archival research and a historically grounded theory of
realism, "Frantic Panoramas" is an innovative and comprehensive
study of how the emergence of mass culture affected literary
culture in America.
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