Democracy's Spectacle : Sovereignty and Public Life in Antebellum American Writing / Jennifer Greiman.
Greiman, Jennifer, author.
2011
Available Online

Linked e-resources

Linked Resource Online Access

Details

Title Democracy's Spectacle : Sovereignty and Public Life in Antebellum American Writing / Jennifer Greiman.
Author Greiman, Jennifer, author.
ISBN 9780823241651
DOI https://doi.org/10.1515/9780823241651
Published New York, NY : Fordham University Press, [2011]
Copyright ©2011
Language English
Language Note In English.
Description 1 online resource (292 p.)
Other Standard Identifiers 10.1515/9780823241651 doi
Dewey Decimal Classification 810.93587349999996
Summary "What is the hangman but a servant of law? And what is that law but an expression of public opinion? And if public opinion be brutal and thou a component part thereof, art thou not the hangman's accomplice?" Writing in 1842, Lydia Maria Child articulates a crisis in the relationship of democracy to sovereign power that continues to occupy political theory today. Is sovereignty, with its reliance on singular and exceptional power, fundamentally inimical to democracy? Or might a more fully realized democracy distribute, share, and popularize sovereignty, thus blunting its exceptional character and its basic violence? In Democracy's Spectacle, Jennifer Greiman looks to an earlier moment in the history of American democracy's vexed interpretation of sovereignty to argue that such questions about the popularization of sovereign power shaped debates about political belonging and public life in the antebellum United States. In an emergent democracy that was also an expansionist slave society, Greiman argues, the problems that sovereignty posed were less concerned with a singular and exceptional power lodged in the state than with a power over life and death that involved all Americans intimately.Drawing on Alexis de Tocqueville's analysis of the sovereignty of the people in Democracy in America, along with work by Gustave de Beaumont, Lydia Maria Child, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville, Greiman tracks the crises of sovereign power as it migrates out of the state to become a constitutive feature of the public sphere. Greiman brings together literature and political theory, as well as materials on antebellum performance culture, antislavery activism, and penitentiary reform, to argue that the antebellum public sphere, transformed by its empowerment, emerges as a spectacle with investments in both punishment and entertainment.
Access Note Access limited to authorized users.
System Details Note Mode of access: Internet via World Wide Web.
Digital File Characteristics text file PDF
Source of Description Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 03. Jan 2023)
In Fordham University Press Complete eBook-Package Pre-2014
Fordham University Press eBook-Package Backlist 2000-2013
Available in Other Form print 9780823230990
Linked Resources Online Access
Record Appears in Online Resources > Ebooks
All Resources
Frontmatter
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. "The thing is new": Sovereignty and Slavery in Democracy in America
2. Color, Race, and the Spectacle of Opinion in Beaumont's Marie
3. "The Hangman's Accomplice": Spectacle and Complicity in Lydia Maria Child's New York
4. The Spectacle of Reform: Theater and Prison in Hawthorne's Blithedale Romance
5. Theatricality, Strangeness, and Democracy in Melville's Confidence-Man
Notes
Select Bibliography
Index

Browse Subjects

Show more subjects...

Statistics

from
to
Export