“The contributions of America’s Sketchbook are multiple. To begin with, Hamilton’s examination of both regional writing and the emergence of modernism is original and should inspire further work in these areas. Secondly, her emphasis on the sketch illuminates the entrance into the literary marketplace of writers such as Harriet Jacobs, Harriet Wilson, and Alice Cary…Hamilton’s book serves to refocus the study of American literature in a necessary way.”
Jennifer Putzi, Nineteenth-Century Prose
“In this tightly-written, well-researched study, Hamilton traces pre-Civil War sketches from their early use as entertainment to their value as realistic sociological records of US national identity, particularly regarding gender and class…Libraries serving graduates schools in humanities and sociology will find this volume a useful addition, particularly the lengthy section of helpful notes.”
W. Britton, Choice
America’s Sketchbook recaptures the drama of nineteenth-century American cultural life, placing at its center a genre—the literary sketch—more available than the novel, less governable by the critical establishment, and shot through with the tensions and types of local and national culture-making. In the first Golden Age of magazines (1820-1860), the brief, open form of the sketch seized the attention of a brand-new mass audience, readers of magazines as well as books, and authors as diverse as Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Fanny Fern, Edgar Allan Poe, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Caroline Kirkland, Harriet E. Wilson, Herman Melville, and Sarah Bagley. It became, as a result, a vigorous force in the democratization of American literature.
In her comprehensive study of American sketch-writing, Kristie Hamilton provides new insight into the powers of mass-market intimacy—more personal and home-like than home—and into leisure, which as a component of middle-class identity is quite as imperative in its achievement as disciplined morality. Here, also, is a more complex story of the aesthetic, as a class-inflected realm, in which factory women and rural and urban middle-class authors debate the shape of literature and life.
In America’s Sketchbook, Hamilton raises the ante for literary and cultural historians with her complex analysis of genre and social formation by describing a richer, more dynamic, and more deeply complicated nineteenth century.
Kristie Hamilton, Assistant Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, teaches in the Literary Studies and Modern Studies Programs of the Department of English. She has published essays and reviews on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American literature and rural women’s history. More info →
Retail price:
$39.95 ·
Save 20% ($31.96)
US and Canada only
Share 
Permission to reprint
Permission
to photocopy or include in a course pack
via Copyright Clearance
Center
Hardcover
978-0-8214-1199-5
Retail price: $39.95,
S.
Release date: March 1998
203 pages
Rights: World
Transcendental Wordplay
America’s Romantic Punsters and the Search for the Language of Nature
By Michael West
Throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, America was captivated by a muddled notion of “etymology.” New England Transcendentalism was only one outcropping of a nationwide movement in which schoolmasters across small-town America taught students the roots of words in ways that dramatized religious issues and sparked wordplay.Shaped by this ferment, our major romantic authors shared the sensibility that Friedrich Schlegel linked to punning and christened “romantic irony.”
American Literature · Literary Criticism · 19th century · United States · Literature
West of the Border
The Multicultural Literature of the Western American Frontiers
By Noreen Groover Lape
Expanding the scope of American borderland and frontier literary scholarship, West of the Border examines the writings of nineteenth- and turn-of-the-century Native, African, Asian, and Anglo American frontier writers. This book views frontiers as “human spaces” where cultures make contact as it considers multicultural frontier writers who speak from “west of the border.”James
Gender Studies · American Literature · Women’s Studies · Literature · Western Americana
Detection and Its Designs
Narrative and Power in Nineteenth-Century Detective Fiction
By Peter Thoms
Detective fiction is usually thought of as genre fiction, a vast group of works bound together by their use of a common formula. But, as Peter Thoms argues in his investigation of some of the most important texts in the development of detective fiction in the nineteenth century, the very works that establish the genre’s formulaic structure also subvert that structure.
Literary Criticism | European | English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh · Literature · Victorian Studies
Hired Pens
Professional Writers in America’s Golden Age of Print
By Ronald Weber
Just as mass-market magazines and cheap books have played important roles in the creation of an American identity, those skilled craftsmen (and women) whose careers are the subjects of Ronald Weber’s narrative profoundly influenced the outlook and strategies of the high-culture writers who are generally the focus of literary studies.Hired
