Hard Facts Paperback

Philip Fisher

American culture has often been described in terms of paradigmatic images--the wilderness, the Jeffersonian landscape of family farms, the great industrial cities at the turn of the 19th century. But underlying these cultural ideals are less happy paradoxes. Settling the land meant banishing the Indians and destroying the wilderness; Jeffersonian landscapes were created with the help of the new country's enslaved citizens; and economic opportunities in the cities were purchased at the high price of self-commercialization. In this study of the popular 19th- and early 20th-century American novel, Philip Fisher demonstrates how such works as Dreiser's Sister Carrie and An American Tragedy, Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin and Cooper's The Deersla

0195041313

9780195041316

English

Oxford University Press

27-Apr-10

204