Description
An elegant study lean and clear concerning the context of American writing and the significance of understanding, in the author's words, "the diverse and changing worlds that have been constructed around writing in American social life." Brodhead is head of the English department at Yale. Annotation copyright Book News, Inc. Portland, Or.
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Using a variety of historical sources, Richard H. Brodhead reconstructs the institutionalized literary worlds that coexisted in nineteenth-century America: the middle-class domestic culture of letters, the culture of mass-produced cheap reading, the militantly hierarchical high culture of post-emancipation black education. He describes how these socially structured worlds of writing shaped the terms of literary practice for writers like Stowe, Hawthorne, Fanny Fern, Louisa May Alcott, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Charles Chesnutt.
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