| Description |
1 online resource (xiv, 229 pages) : illustrations, map |
| Contents |
Forever stained with blood, blood, blood! : murder and mass journalism in Hawthorne's Salem -- The journalistic origins of romance -- Hawthorne's city of refuge -- In this world of lies : Zachary Taylor and the American telegraph in Melville's New York -- The island telegraph : information culture and the Melvillean self in Typee -- Benito Cereno and the blunt-thinking American |
| Summary |
"The Arbiters of Reality: Hawthorne, Melville, and the Rise of Mass Information Culture disrupts our critical sense of nineteenth-century American literature by examining the storytelling strategies of both Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville in light of an emerging information industry. Peter West reveals how these writers invoked telegraphic and penny press journalism, daguerreotypy, and moving panoramas in their fiction to claim for themselves a privileged access to a reality beyond the reach of a burgeoning mass audience." "Locating Hawthorne and Melville in vivid and overlooked contexts - the Salem Murder scandal of 1830, which transformed Hawthorne's quiet city into a media-manufactured spectacle, and Melville's New York City of 1846-47, where the American Telegraph was powerfully articulating a nation at war - West portrays the romance as a reactive, deeply rhetorical literary form and a rich historical artifact." "In the early twenty-first century, it has become a postmodern cliche to place the word "reality" in scare quotes. The Arbiters of Reality suggests that attending to the construction of the real in public life is more than simply a language of critique: it must also be understood as a specific kind of romantic self-invention."--Jacket |
| Bibliography |
Includes bibliographical references (pages 213-224) and index |
| Notes |
Print version record |
| Subject |
Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 1804-1864 -- Criticism and interpretation
|
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Melville, Herman, 1819-1891 -- Criticism and interpretation
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| SUBJECT |
Melville, Herman, 1819-1891 -- Criticism and interpretation
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Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 1804-1864 -- Criticism and interpretation
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Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 1804-1864. fast (OCoLC)fst00030387 |
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Melville, Herman, 1819-1891. fast (OCoLC)fst00030216 |
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Hawthorne, Nathaniel 1804-1864 gnd |
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Melville, Herman 1819-1891 gnd |
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Melville, Herman. swd |
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Hawthorne, Nathaniel. swd |
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Centro para la Promoción de la Conservación del Suelo y del Agua Buenos Aires gnd |
| Subject |
Reality in literature.
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Journalism -- United States -- History -- 19th century
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Telegraph -- United States -- History -- 19th century
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Narration (Rhetoric) -- History -- 19th century
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Romanticism -- United States
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Literature and society -- United States -- History -- 19th century
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Journalism.
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Literature and society.
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Narration (Rhetoric)
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Reality in literature.
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Romanticism.
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Telegraph.
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Massenmedien
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Prosa.
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United States.
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| Genre/Form |
Criticism, interpretation, etc.
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History.
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| Form |
Electronic book
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| LC no. |
2008005982 |
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