Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790-1860 / Edition 1

by Tompkins, Jane P. Tompkins

Overview

What makes a literary classic? In "Sensational Designs" Jane Tompkins argues that it is not the intrinsic merit of a text, but rather the circumstances of its writing. Against the modernist belief that art, in order to be art, must be free from propaganda, Tompkins contends that writers like Brockden Brown, Cooper, Stowe, and Warner wrote in order to alter the face of the social world, not to elicit aesthetic appreciation.Thus, the value and significance of the novels, for readers of their time, depended on precisely those characteristics that formalist criticism has taught us to deplore: stereotyped characters, sensational plots, and cliched language.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780195041194
Publisher:	Oxford University Press, USA
Publication date:	06/28/1989
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	8.25(w) x 5.50(h) x 0.75(d)

Editorial Reviews

"One of the important works of the year....Contains some of the best arguments I know on the conventionality of canon formation."—Michael J. Hoffman, American Literary Scholarship

"Wide-ranging, clearly written, cogently argued.... One of those stimulating and significant seminal studies sure to be frequently cited."—Choice.

"A major reassessment of nineteenth-century 'sentimental' novels...Force[s] us to reconsider on every page our usual notions of literary valuation, interpretive bias, and canon formation."—Western Humanities Review

"Sensational Designs...is an eye-opener for those too much obsessed by their own academic and cultural investments to understand the true stylistic and ideological complexity of nineteenth-century American fiction."—Philip F. Gura, Esquire

"A cogently argued redefinition of the entire process of literary study."—Women's Review of Books

From the Publisher