Confounding Images: Photography and Portraiture in Antebellum American FictionSusan Williams recovers the literary and cultural significance of early photography in an important rereading of American fiction in the decades preceding the Civil War. The rise of photography occurred simultaneously with the rapid expansion of magazine publication in America, and Williams analyzes the particular role that periodicals such as Godey's Lady's Book, Burton's Gentleman's Magazine, and Atkinson's Casket played in defining how photography was received. At the center of the book are readings of a stunning array of fiction by forgotten and canonical writers alike, including Edgar Allan Poe, Louisa May Alcott, and Sarah Hale, as well as extended interpretations of Nathaniel Hawthorne's House of the Seven Gables and The Marble Faun and Herman Melville's Pierre. In a concluding section, Williams offers a view of the fictional portrait in the later nineteenth century, when the proliferation of illustrated books once again transformed the relation between word and image in American culture. |
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... Hawthorne's friend Henry Tuckerman put it , " the only worthy pleasures peculiar to Europe , are those of taste , and . . . to enjoy these , a certain preparedness is requisite . ” 14 Hawthorne himself began to undertake such ...
... Hawthorne pro- vided in " The Custom House " ( quoted in Dolis , 62 ) . 34. Harper's New Monthly Magazine 7 ... Hawthorne's " Lost Notebook ” in “ Salem in The House of the Seven Gables , ” in Critical Essays on Haw- thorne's The House ...
... Hawthorne wrote a book about copy- ing because he was so conscious of his own copying . MacKay also points out that Sophia Hawthorne , who was a copyist before her marriage , later encountered her own problems with duplication as she ...
Contents
The Portrait and the Social Construction of Ekphrasis | 15 |
Hildas Tower illustration from The Marble Faun | 26 |
The Narrative | 35 |
Copyright | |
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American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 1834-1853 Meredith L. McGill No preview available - 2007 |
American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 1834-1853 Meredith L. McGill Limited preview - 2003 |