Authorship and Audience: Literary Performance in the American Renaissance (Princeton Legacy Library, 1214) - Softcover

Railton, Stephen

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0691015163 ISBN 13: 9780691015163

Publisher: Princeton University Press, 1991

Synopsis

Stephen Railton's study of the American Renaissance proposes a fresh way of conceiving the writer as a performing artist and the text as an enactment of the drama of its own performance. Railton focuses on how major prose works of the period are preoccupied with their readers--how they seek to negotiate the conflicted space between the authors, who brought to the act of publication their own anxieties of ambition and identity, and the contemporary American reading public, which, as a growing mass audience in a democracy, had acquired an unprecedented authority over the terms of literary performance. New readings of Emerson's orations, Poe's tales, the sketches of the Southwest Humorists, Walden, Uncle Tom's Cabin, The Scarlet Letter, and Moby-Dick relocate American writers in the dramatic context in which they suffered and thrived. The book attends closely to historicist issues, arguing that one of the most profound ways that the culture shaped these texts was also the most immediate--as the audience each writer had to address. Equally concerned with biographical themes, it appreciates each of the major works within the larger pattern of the writer's public career and private needs.

Originally published in 1991.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

About this title

About the Author:

Stephen Railton is Professor of English at the University of Virginia. His previous books include "Fenimore Cooper: A Study of his Imagination" (1978) and "Authorship and Audience: Literary Performance in the American Renaissance "(1991). He is the creator of two major websites on "Uncle Tom's Cabin & American" Culture and "Mark Twain in His Times",""

From Library Journal:

In approaching the prose works of the writers of the American Literary Renaissance (Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, and Harriet Beecher Stowe), Railton focuses on their preoccupation with the literary form as dramatic performance and their potential readers as audience. After an introductory chapter in which he spells out his thesis more clearly, Railton devotes a chapter to each writer. A chapter on "Southwestern Humor" shows slight relevance to the others, while the concluding chapter does little to pull all of the strands together and leaves the reader a little at loose ends. For upper-division undergraduates.
- Lynn Randall, Caldwell Coll. Lib., N.J.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Publication date: 1991
• ISBN 10: 0691015163
• ISBN 13: 9780691015163
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 258