TY - BOOK ID - 85474795 TI - Fictions of mass democracy in nineteenth-century America PY - 2015 SN - 1316383164 1316359166 1316360369 1316360962 131635976X 1316384969 131625660X 1107107806 1107515793 1316379566 PB - Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, DB - UniCat KW - American fiction KW - Populism in literature. KW - Democracy in literature. KW - Public opinion in literature. KW - History and criticism. UR - https://www.unicat.be/uniCat?func=search&query=sysid:85474795 AB - Fictions of Mass Democracy in Nineteenth-Century America examines how mass democracy was understood before public opinion could be measured by polls. It argues that fiction, in its freedom to represent what resists representation, develops the most groundbreaking theories of the democratic public. These literary accounts of democracy focus less on overt pubic action than the profound effects of everyday social encounters. This book thus departs from recent scholarship, which emphasizes the responsibilities of citizenship and the achievements of oppositional social movements. It demonstrates how novels and stories by Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Fanny Fern, Harriet Jacobs and James Fenimore Cooper attempt to understand a public organized not only by explicitly political discourse, but by informal and disorganized social networks. ER -