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Philadelphia Stories - America's Literature of Race and Freedom (Hardcover)
Loot Price: R1,130
Discovery Miles 11 300
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Philadelphia Stories - America's Literature of Race and Freedom (Hardcover)
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The site of William Penn's 'Holy Experiment' in religious
toleration and representative government, Philadelphia was home to
one of the largest and most influential 'free' African American
communities in the United States. The city was seen as a laboratory
for social experimentation, one with international consequences.
While historians such as Gary B. Nash and Julie Winch have
chronicled the distinctive social and political space of early
national Philadelphia, no sustained attempt has been made to
understand how writers such as Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Brockden
Brown, George Lippard, and others were creating a distinctive
literary tradition, one shaped by the city itself. Analyzing a
sequence of texts written in and about Philadelphia between the
Constitution and the Civil War, Otter shows how literary discourse
intervened significantly in the period's intense debates about
character, race, and nation. The book advances chronologically from
the 1790s to the 1850s, and it is organized around the volatile
issues the Philadelphia writing tradition responded to: contagion,
riots, manners, and freedom. Throughout this exemplary work, Otter
reveals how historical events produced a literature that wrestles
with specific concerns: the city as specimen, the diagnosis and
proper treatment for urban disorder, the effects of position on
interpretation, the trials of character, the substance of action,
the nature of human difference and similarity, and the vehemence of
prejudice. Philadelphia Stories is a work that reveals (1) how the
writers of Philadelphia defined the edge between freedom and
slavery, altering the course of America's intellectual and national
history, and (2) how the figure 'Philadelphia' stands for a place,
a history, a tradition of the 'literary' that enriches and even
clarifies the whole of American literary history.
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