By the sweat of the brow : literature and labor in antebellum America
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
By the sweat of the brow : literature and labor in antebellum America
University of Chicago Press, 1993
- : pbk
Available at 39 libraries
Note
Includes bibliographical references (p. 245-267) and index
Description and Table of Contents
- Volume
-
ISBN 9780226075549
Description
The spread of industrialism, the emergence of professionalism, the challenge to slavery - these and other developments fuelled an anxious debate about work in antebellum America. Nicholas 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 writers scrutinized work and reflected upon its relation to their own work of writing. Bromell argues that American writers sensed a deep affinity between the mental labour of writing and such bodily labours as blacksmithing, mothering and growing crops. He also contributes to 19th-century social history by examining opinions on the nature of maternity, ideological efforts to devalue skilled labour, and the paradoxical idea that slaves sometimes found in their labour a mode of self-actualization within slavery. Combining 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.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments Introduction: "Ain't That Work?" Pt. 1: The Works of Mind and Body 1: Manual Labor and the Problem of Literary Representation 2: The Meaning and Demeaning of Manual Labor at the Exhibitions of the Massachusetts Charitable Mechanic Association Pt. 2: Eros and Labor 3: The Erotics of Labor in Melville's Redburn 4: Naturalized Labor and Natural History in Thoreau's A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers Pt. 3: Labor's Gendered Body 5: Women Carved of Oak and Korl: The Female Body as the Site of Gendered Labor in Hawthorne and Davis 6: The Labored Discourse of Domesticity 7: Maternal Labor in the Work of "Literary Domestics": Catharine Maria Sedgwick and Susan Warner 8: Literary Composition as Maternal Labor in Uncle Tom's Cabin Pt. 4: Writing the Work of Slaves 9: The Meanings of Work and Song in Antebellum Slavery 10: Slavery, Work, and Song in Frederick Douglass's Autobiographies Pt. 5: Toward an Ontology of Labor 11: "By the Labor of My Hands Only": The Making and Unmaking of Walden Afterword Notes Index
- Volume
-
: pbk ISBN 9780226075556
Description
The spread of industrialism, the emergence of professionalism and the challenge to slavery fueled an anxious debate about the meaning and value of work in 19th-century America. In chapters examining authors such as Thoreau, Melville, Hawthorne, Rebecca Harding Davis, Susan Warner, Harriet Beecher Stowe and Frederick Douglass, this work argues that American writers generally sensed a deep affinity between the mental labour of writing and such physical labours as blacksmithing, house building, housework, mothering and farming. Combining literary and social history, canonical and non-canonical texts, primary source material and contemporary theory, the author seeks to establish work as an important subject of cultural criticism.
by "Nielsen BookData"