TY - BOOK ID - 77862007 TI - The aesthetics and politics of the crowd in American literature PY - 2003 SN - 1107133866 1280161337 0511120648 1139148206 0511064977 0511058640 0511305818 0511485492 0511073437 9780511064975 9780511073434 9780511120640 9780521814881 052181488X 9780511485497 9781280161339 9786610161331 661016133X 9780521035903 0521035902 9781107133860 9781139148207 9780511058646 9780511305818 PB - Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, DB - UniCat KW - American literature KW - Crowds in literature. KW - Politics and literature KW - Literature and society KW - Collective behavior in literature. KW - City and town life in literature. KW - Immigrants in literature. KW - Lynching in literature. KW - Aesthetics, American. KW - Mobs in literature. KW - Race in literature. KW - American aesthetics KW - Literature KW - Literature and politics KW - History and criticism. KW - Political aspects KW - Arts and Humanities UR - https://www.unicat.be/uniCat?func=search&query=sysid:77862007 AB - Mary Esteve provides a study of crowd representations in American literature from the antebellum era to the early twentieth century. As a central icon of political and cultural democracy, the crowd occupies a prominent place in the American literary and cultural landscape. Esteve examines a range of writing by Poe, Hawthorne, Lydia Maria Child, Du Bois, James, and Stephen Crane among others. These writers, she argues, distinguish between the aesthetics of immersion in a crowd and the mode of collectivity demanded of political-liberal subjects. In their representations of everyday crowds, ranging from streams of urban pedestrians to swarms of train travellers, from upper-class parties to lower-class revivalist meetings, such authors seize on the political problems facing a mass liberal democracy - problems such as the stipulations of citizenship, nation formation, mass immigration and the emergence of mass media. Esteve examines both the aesthetic and political meanings of such urban crowd scenes. ER -