Philadelphia stories : America's literature of race and freedom
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Philadelphia stories : America's literature of race and freedom
Oxford University Press, 2010
Available at 7 libraries
  Aomori
  Iwate
  Miyagi
  Akita
  Yamagata
  Fukushima
  Ibaraki
  Tochigi
  Gunma
  Saitama
  Chiba
  Tokyo
  Kanagawa
  Niigata
  Toyama
  Ishikawa
  Fukui
  Yamanashi
  Nagano
  Gifu
  Shizuoka
  Aichi
  Mie
  Shiga
  Kyoto
  Osaka
  Hyogo
  Nara
  Wakayama
  Tottori
  Shimane
  Okayama
  Hiroshima
  Yamaguchi
  Tokushima
  Kagawa
  Ehime
  Kochi
  Fukuoka
  Saga
  Nagasaki
  Kumamoto
  Oita
  Miyazaki
  Kagoshima
  Okinawa
  Korea
  China
  Thailand
  United Kingdom
  Germany
  Switzerland
  France
  Belgium
  Netherlands
  Sweden
  Norway
  United States of America
Note
Bibliography: p. 343-369
Includes index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
The site of William Penn's 'Holy Experiment' in religious toleration and representative government, Philadelphia was home to one of the largest and most influential 'free' African American communities in the United States. The city was seen as a laboratory for social experimentation, one with international consequences. While historians such as Gary B. Nash and Julie Winch have chronicled the distinctive social and political space of early national Philadelphia, no
sustained attempt has been made to understand how writers such as Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Brockden Brown, George Lippard, and others were creating a distinctive literary tradition, one shaped by the city itself. Analyzing a sequence of texts written in and about Philadelphia between the
Constitution and the Civil War, Otter shows how literary discourse intervened significantly in the period's intense debates about character, race, and nation. The book advances chronologically from the 1790s to the 1850s, and it is organized around the volatile issues the Philadelphia writing tradition responded to: contagion, riots, manners, and freedom. Throughout this exemplary work, Otter reveals how historical events produced a literature that wrestles with specific concerns: the city as
specimen, the diagnosis and proper treatment for urban disorder, the effects of position on interpretation, the trials of character, the substance of action, the nature of human difference and similarity, and the vehemence of prejudice. Philadelphia Stories is a work that reveals (1) how the writers
of Philadelphia defined the edge between freedom and slavery, altering the course of America's intellectual and national history, and (2) how the figure 'Philadelphia' stands for a place, a history, a tradition of the 'literary' that enriches and even clarifies the whole of American literary history.
Table of Contents
- INTRODUCTION: PHILADELPHIA STORIES, 1790-1860
- MATHEW CAREY, ABSALOM JONES, RICHARD ALLEN, AND THE COLOR OF FEVERLLLL..
- MINISTERS AND CRIMINALS: RICHARD ALLEN, JOHN JOYCE, AND PETER MATTHIAS
- BENJAMIN RUSH'S HEROIC INTERVENTIONS
- MATHEW CAREY'S FUGITIVE PHILADELPHIANS
- CHARLES BROCKDEN BROWN'S EXPERIMENTS IN CHARACTER
- HUGH HENRY BRACKENRIDGE, AND THE IRREPRESSIBLE TEAGUE
- EDWARD W. CLAY'S "LIFE IN PHILADELPHIA
- "THE RAGE FOR PROFILES": SILHOUETTES AT PEALE'S MUSEUM
- PHILADELPHIA METEMPSYCHOSIS IN ROBERT MONTGOMERY BIRD'S SHEPPARD LEE
- THE PECULIAR POSITION OF OUR PEOPLE
- WILLIAM WHIPPER AND DEBATES IN THE BLACK CONVENTIONS.
- DISFRANCHISEMENT AND APPEAL
- JOSEPH WILLSON'S HIGHER CLASSES OF COLORED SOCIETY IN PHILADELPHIA
- "DOOMED TO DESTRUCTION": THE HISTORY OF PENNSYLVANIA HALL
- THE PORTRAITURE OF THE CITY OF PHILADELPHIA, AND HENRY JAMES'S AMERICAN SCENE THE MYSTERIES OF THE CITY: GEORGE LIPPARD, EDGAR ALLAN POE
- THE FICTION OF RIOT: GEORGE LIPPARD, JOHN BEAUCHAMP JONES
- THE CONDITION OF THE FREE PEOPLE OF COLOR
- THE STRUGGLE OVER "PHILADELPHIA": MARY HOWARD SCHOOLCRAFT, SARA JOSEPHA
- HALE, MARTIN ROBISON DELANY, JAMES MCCUNE SMITH, AND WILLIAM
- WHIPPER FRANK J. WEBB'S THE GARIES AND THEIR FRIENDS
- "A RATHER CURIOUS PROTEST
- STILL LIFE IN GEORGIA
- HISTORY AND FARCE
- PARLOR AND RIOT
- PHILADELPHIA VANITAS
- THE SOCIAL EXPERIMENT IN HERMAN MELVILLE'S BENITO CERENO
- CODA: JOHN EDGAR WIDEMAN'S PHILADELPHIA
- BIBLIOGRAPHY
by "Nielsen BookData"