Carnival on the Page: Popular Print Media in Antebellum America

Front Cover
UNC Press Books, Jun 19, 2003 - Language Arts & Disciplines - 264 pages
In the decades before the Civil War, American society witnessed the emergence of a new form of print culture, as penny papers, mammoth weeklies, giftbooks, fashion magazines, and other ephemeral printed materials brought exuberance and theatricality to public culture and made the practice of reading more controversial. For a short yet pivotal period, argues Isabelle Lehuu, the world of print was turned upside down.

Unlike the printed works of the eighteenth century, produced to educate and refine, the new media aimed to entertain a widening yet diversified public of men and women. As they gained popularity among American readers, these new print forms provoked fierce reactions from cultural arbiters who considered them transgressive. No longer the manly art of intellectual pursuit, reading took on new meaning; reading for pleasure became an act with the power to silently disrupt the social order.

Neither just an epilogue to an earlier age of scarce books and genteel culture nor merely a prologue to the late nineteenth century and its mass culture and commercial literature, the antebellum era marked a significant passage in the history of books and reading in the United States, Lehuu argues.

Originally published 2000.

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Contents

The Elusive Reading Revolution
14
Little Sheets of News and Varieties The Penny Wonder in New York City
36
Mammoths and Extras Staging a Spectacle in Print
59
Leaflets of Memory Giftbooks and the Economy of the Gaze
76
The Ladys Book and the Female Vernacular in Print Culture
102
A Useful Recreation Advice on Reading in the Age of Abundance
126
Conclusion
156
Notes
161
Selected Bibliography
191
Index
227
Copyright

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Page 1 - ALICE was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, "and what is the use of a book", thought Alice, "without pictures or conversations?
Page 5 - The attributes of liminality or of liminal personae ("threshold people") are necessarily ambiguous, since this condition and these persons elude or slip through the network of classifications that normally locate states and positions in cultural space. Liminal entities are neither here nor there; they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremonial.

About the author (2003)

Isabelle Lehuu is associate professor of history at the Universite du Quebec a Montreal.

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