Description
Book SynopsisDrawing on a rich archive of magazine fiction, verse satires, comic almanacs, false slave narratives, minstrel song-sheets, and early literary criticism, this book uncovers the controversies over literary fraudulence that plagued the antebellum period and shows how they at once made and unmade American literature.
Trade Review"
The Fabrication of American Literature is fresh and surprising in its arguments, and deeply learned in its scholarship. Antebellum American literature, we learn, was not just interested in the topic of fraudulence, it was itself fraudulent-and this is a good thing. I am confident that readers will be deeply interested and thoroughly impressed by Lara Langer Cohen's wonderful accomplishment." * Christopher Looby, University of California, Los Angeles *
"Reader, this book is no fraud. In fact, Lara Langer Cohen's
The Fabrication of American Literature not only carries its smart and consequential argument to very satisfyingly conclusive lengths but it also saves us many a yawn in doing so, with its showman's sense of pith and pace." *
Nineteenth-Century Literature *
Table of ContentsIntroduction: American Literary Fraudulence
Chapter 1. "One Vast Perambulating Humbug": Literary Nationalism and the Rise of the Puffing System
Chapter 2. Backwoods and Blackface: The Strange Careers of Davy Crockett and Jim Crow
Chapter 3. "Slavery Never Can Be Represented": James Williams and the Racial Politics of Imposture
Chapter 4. Mediums of Exchange: Fanny Fern's Unoriginality
Conclusion: The Confidence Man on a Large Scale
Notes
Works Cited
Index
Acknowledgments
