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  3. Imagining Equality in Nineteenth-Century American Literature
  • Cited by 8
Publisher:
Cambridge University Press
Online publication date:
May 2010
Print publication year:
2008
Online ISBN:
9780511720079
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511720079
Series:
Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture (157)
Subjects:
Literature, Area Studies, American Literature, American Studies, Literary Theory
Information

Book description

The theme of inequality has often dominated academic criticism, which has been concerned with identifying, analyzing, and demystifying various regimes of power and the illicit hierarchies upon which they are built. Studies of the United States in the nineteenth century have followed this trend in focusing on slavery, women's writing, and working-class activism. Kerry Larson advocates the importance of looking instead at equality as a central theme, viewing it not as an endangered ideal to strive for and protect but as an imagined social reality in its own right, one with far-reaching consequences. In this original study, he reads the literature of the pre-Civil War United States against Tocqueville's theories of equality. Imagining Equality tests these theories in the work of a broad array of authors and genres, both canonical and non-canonical, and in doing so discovers important themes in Stowe, Hawthorne, Douglass and Alcott.

Reviews

"[Larson's] book breaks new ground in exploring revolutionary literary imagining in the United States. Larson's lens...will surely enable students of the antebellum U.S. to sharpen and widen their focus within and across academic disciplines."
-Andrea Stone, nbol-19.org

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