In The Genuine Article Paul Gilmore examines the interdependence of literary and mass culture at a crucial moment in U. S. history. Demonstrating from a new perspective the centrality of race to the construction of white manhood across class lines, Gilmore argues that in the years before the Civil War, as literature increasingly became another commodity in the capitalist cultural marketplace, American authors appropriated middle-brow and racially loaded cultural forms to bolster their masculinity.
From characters in Indian melodramas and minstrel shows to exhibits in popular museums and daguerrotype galleries, primitive racialized figures circulated as “the genuine article” of manliness in the antebellum United States. Gilmore argues that these figures were manipulated, translated, and adopted not only by canonical authors such as Hawthorne, Thoreau, Cooper, and Melville but also by African American and Native American writers like William Wells Brown and Okah Tubbee. By examining how these cultural notions of race played out in literary texts and helped to construct authorship as a masculine profession, Gilmore makes a unique contribution to theories of class formation in nineteenth-century America.
The Genuine Article will enrich students and scholars of American studies, gender studies, literature, history, sociology, anthropology, popular culture, and race.
- Illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Prologue: Staging Manhood, Writing Manhood: Cultural Authority and the Indian Body
- 1 ‘‘De Genewine Artekil’’: William Wells Brown, Blackface Minstrelsy, and Abolitionism
- 2 The Indian in the Museum: Henry David Thoreau, Okah Tubbee, and Authentic Manhood
- 3 A ‘‘Rara Avis in Terris ’’: Poe’s ‘‘Hop-Frog’’ and Race in the Antebellum Freak Show
- 4 Inward Criminality and the Shadow of Race: The House of the Seven Gables and Daguerreotypy
- Epilogue: Electric Chains
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
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