Mechanic Accents

Mechanic Accents
Author: Michael Denning
Publisher: Verso
Total Pages: 296
Release: 1998-09-17
Genre: History
ISBN:

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A study of American popular fiction and working-class culture, combining Marxist literary theory with American labour history. The text explores what happened when, in the 19th century, working people began to read cheap novels and the "fiction question" became a class question

Mechanic Accents

Mechanic Accents
Author: Michael Denning
Publisher: London ; New York : Verso
Total Pages: 276
Release: 1987
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN:

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Factory Firls and Upperclass Seducers; the Molly Maguires and the Knights of Labor; Pinkertons and Tramps; Deadwood Dick and the James Gang: the 'dime novel' was the most widely read literature of the nineteenth century. It was also the contested tarrain of ideological class struggle, between middle-class moralism and the 'mechanic accents' of popular sensationalism. This is the first detailed study of the American dime novel phenomenom in an international context. Theorhetically informed by Marx, Gramsci, Bakhtin and Fredric Jameson among others. Dennings brings to bear and unrivalled knowledge of the primary material. The book explores both the social conditions which led to their popularity and the thematic conventions of the dime novels themselves. He concludes that their central function - representing the utopian longings of their working-class readerships - has been missed by critics of these cheap fictions. Mechanic Accents adds a new dimension to our understanding of the 'artisan republican' ideology of the nineteenth-century working class as well as the origins of the 'culture industry'. [Summary from back cover]

Mechanic Accents

Mechanic Accents
Author: Michael Denning
Publisher: London ; New York : Verso
Total Pages: 280
Release: 1987
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN:

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Factory Firls and Upperclass Seducers; the Molly Maguires and the Knights of Labor; Pinkertons and Tramps; Deadwood Dick and the James Gang: the 'dime novel' was the most widely read literature of the nineteenth century. It was also the contested tarrain of ideological class struggle, between middle-class moralism and the 'mechanic accents' of popular sensationalism. This is the first detailed study of the American dime novel phenomenom in an international context. Theorhetically informed by Marx, Gramsci, Bakhtin and Fredric Jameson among others. Dennings brings to bear and unrivalled knowledge of the primary material. The book explores both the social conditions which led to their popularity and the thematic conventions of the dime novels themselves. He concludes that their central function - representing the utopian longings of their working-class readerships - has been missed by critics of these cheap fictions. Mechanic Accents adds a new dimension to our understanding of the 'artisan republican' ideology of the nineteenth-century working class as well as the origins of the 'culture industry'. [Summary from back cover]

The Web of Iniquity

The Web of Iniquity
Author: Catherine Ross Nickerson
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 300
Release: 1998
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9780822322719

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Post-Civil War detective fiction, written mostly by women, considered in relation to other forms of sentimental and domestic fiction.

Ladies of Labor, Girls of Adventure

Ladies of Labor, Girls of Adventure
Author: Nan Enstad
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 288
Release: 1999
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9780231111034

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At the beginning of the twentieth century, labor leaders in women's unions routinely chastised their members for their ceaseless pursuit of fashion, avid reading of dime novels, and "affected" ways, including aristocratic airs and accents. Indeed, working women in America were eagerly participating in the burgeoning consumer culture available to them. While the leading activists, organizers, and radicals feared that consumerist tendencies made working women seem frivolous and dissuaded them from political action, these women, in fact, went on strike in very large numbers during the period, proving themselves to be politically active, astute, and effective. In Ladies of Labor, Girls of Adventure, historian Nan Enstad explores the complex relationship between consumer culture and political activism for late nineteenth- and twentieth-century working women. While consumerism did not make women into radicals, it helped shape their culture and their identities as both workers and political actors. Examining material ranging from early dime novels about ordinary women who inherit wealth or marry millionaires, to inexpensive, ready-to-wear clothing that allowed them to both deny and resist mistreatment in the workplace, Enstad analyzes how working women wove popular narratives and fashions into their developing sense of themselves as "ladies." She then provides a detailed examination of how this notion of "ladyhood" affected the great New York shirtwaist strike of 1909-1910. From the women's grievances, to the walkout of over 20,000 workers, to their style of picketing, Enstad shows how consumer culture was a central theme in this key event of labor strife. Finally, Enstad turns to the motion picture genre of female adventure serials, popular after 1912, which imbued "ladyhood" with heroines' strength, independence, and daring.

American Sensations

American Sensations
Author: Shelley Streeby
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 402
Release: 2002-05-10
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 052093587X

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This innovative cultural history investigates an intriguing, thrilling, and often lurid assortment of sensational literature that was extremely popular in the United States in 1848--including dime novels, cheap story paper literature, and journalism for working-class Americans. Shelley Streeby uncovers themes and images in this "literature of sensation" that reveal the profound influence that the U.S.-Mexican War and other nineteenth-century imperial ventures throughout the Americas had on U.S. politics and culture. Streeby's analysis of this fascinating body of popular literature and mass culture broadens into a sweeping demonstration of the importance of the concept of empire for understanding U.S. history and literature. This accessible, interdisciplinary book brilliantly analyzes the sensational literature of George Lippard, A.J.H Duganne, Ned Buntline, Metta Victor, Mary Denison, John Rollin Ridge, Louisa May Alcott, and many other writers. Streeby also discusses antiwar articles in the labor and land reform press; ideas about Mexico, Cuba, and Nicaragua in popular culture; and much more. Although the Civil War has traditionally been a major period marker in U.S. history and literature, Streeby proposes a major paradigm shift by using mass culture to show that the U.S.-Mexican War and other conflicts with Mexicans and Native Americans in the borderlands were fundamental in forming the complex nexus of race, gender, and class in the United States.

Labor's Text

Labor's Text
Author: Laura Hapke
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Total Pages: 506
Release: 2001
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780813528809

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"Hapke's book, remarkable in scope and inclusiveness, offers those concerned with American working people a mine of information about and analysis of the 'rich lived history of American laborers' as that has been represented in fictions of every kind. She provides an invaluable foundation for understanding the dirtiest of America's dirty big secrets: the pervasivness of class differences, class discrimination, indeed of class conflict in this, the wealthiest nation in history. Hers is an indispensable guided tour through more than a century and a half of literary representations of 'hands' at their looms, pikets on the line, agitators on their soapboxes, ordinary working women, men, and children in kitchens, parks, factories, and fields across America." --Paul Lauter, A.K. & G.M. Smith Professor of Literature, Trinity College "Labor's Text sets over 150 years of the multi-ethnic literature of work in the context of the history that informed it--the history of labor organizing, of industrial change, of social transformations, and of shifting political alignments. Any scholar of American literature or American history cannot help but be enlightened by this boldly ambitious and illuminating book." -- Shelly Fisher Fishkin, professor of American studies, University of Texas, Austin "Labor's Text traverses nearly two centuries of the U.S. literary response in fiction to workers and the work experience. Casting her net more broadly than any of her predecessors, Hapke's revision of the genre includes many recent writing not usually recognized as part of the tradition. Coming at a moment when there is a steady increase in interest about 'class' from color- and gender-inflected perspectives, this is a work of committed scholarship that may well prove to be a crucial compass to reorient the thinking and scholarship of a new generation." -- Alan Wald, author of Writing from the Left "A stunning work of scholarship. . . . It is an extraordinary achievement and an immense contribution to working-class studies." --Janet Zandy, author of Calling Home: Working-Class Women's Writings Laura Hapke is a professor of English at Pace University. The winner of two Choice magazine Outstanding Academic Book awards, she is the author of Daughters of the Great Depression: Women, Work, and Fiction in the American 1930s and other books on labor fiction and working-class studies.

By the Sweat of the Brow

By the Sweat of the Brow
Author: Nicholas K. Bromell
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 292
Release: 1993
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9780226075556

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The spread of industrialism, the emergence of professionalism, the challenge to slavery - these and other developments fueled an anxious debate about work in antebellum America. In this book, Nicholas K. Bromell discusses the ways in which American writers participated in this cultural contestation of the nature and meaning of work. In chapters on Thoreau, Melville, Hawthorne, Rebecca Harding Davis, Susan Warner, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Frederick Douglass, Bromell shows how these writers not only scrutinized work - be it factory labor, agriculture, maternal labor, or slave labor - but also reflected upon its relation to their own work of writing. Bromell argues that American writers generally sensed a deep affinity between the mental labor of writing and such bodily labors as blacksmithing, house building, housework, mothering, field labor, growing beans, and so on. Nevertheless, writers resisted identifying their labor as purely or simply bodily, both because society placed mental and spiritual labor at the top of its scale of values and because the body was so often the site of gender or racial subjugation. Bromell also makes important contributions to three areas of nineteenth-century social history. He probes the period's conflicting ideas of mothers as both spiritual "angels of the house" and ineluctably embodied laborers in the home. Using as an example the exhibitions of the Massachusetts Charitable Mechanic Association, he discusses the advent of an industrial ideology that sought to devalue the meaning of skilled manual labor. Finally, he suggests that, paradoxically, slaves were sometimes able to find in their labor a mode of self-actualization within slavery. Deftly combining literary and social history, canonical and noncanonical texts, primary source material and contemporary theory, By the Sweat of the Brow establishes work as an important subject of cultural criticism. At the same time, it contributes to discussions of race, gender, and the body in American literary studies.

Astounding Wonder

Astounding Wonder
Author: John Cheng
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Total Pages: 402
Release: 2012-03-19
Genre: History
ISBN: 0812206673

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When physicist Robert Goddard, whose career was inspired by H. G. Wells's War of the Worlds, published "A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes," the response was electric. Newspaper headlines across the country announced, "Modern Jules Verne Invents Rocket to Reach Moon," while people from around the world, including two World War I pilots, volunteered as pioneers in space exploration. Though premature (Goddard's rocket, alas, was only imagined), the episode demonstrated not only science's general popularity but also its intersection with interwar popular and commercial culture. In that intersection, the stories that inspired Goddard and others became a recognizable genre: science fiction. Astounding Wonder explores science fiction's emergence in the era's "pulps," colorful magazines that shouted from the newsstands, attracting an extraordinarily loyal and active audience. Pulps invited readers not only to read science fiction but also to participate in it, joining writers and editors in celebrating a collective wonder for and investment in the potential of science. But in conjuring fantastic machines, travel across time and space, unexplored worlds, and alien foes, science fiction offered more than rousing adventure and romance. It also assuaged contemporary concerns about nation, gender, race, authority, ability, and progress—about the place of ordinary individuals within modern science and society—in the process freeing readers to debate scientific theories and implications separate from such concerns. Readers similarly sought to establish their worth and place outside the pulps. Organizing clubs and conventions and producing their own magazines, some expanded science fiction's community and created a fan subculture separate from the professional pulp industry. Others formed societies to launch and experiment with rockets. From debating relativity and the use of slang in the future to printing purple fanzines and calculating the speed of spaceships, fans' enthusiastic industry revealed the tensions between popular science and modern science. Even as it inspired readers' imagination and activities, science fiction's participatory ethos sparked debates about amateurs and professionals that divided the worlds of science fiction in the 1930s and after.

The Fictional Republic

The Fictional Republic
Author: Carol Nackenoff
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 377
Release: 1994-04-14
Genre: History
ISBN: 0195344847

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Investigating the persistence and place of the formulas of Horatio Alger in American politics, The Fictional Republic reassesses the Alger story in its Gilded Age context. Carol Nackenoff argues that Alger was a keen observer of the dislocations and economic pitfalls of the rapidly industrializing nation, and devised a set of symbols that addressed anxieties about power and identity. As classes were increasingly divided by wealth, life chances, residence space, and culture, Alger maintained that Americans could still belong to one estate. The story of the youth who faces threats to his virtue, power, independence, and identity stands as an allegory of the American Republic. Nackenoff examines how the Alger formula continued to shape political discourse in Reagan's America and beyond.