The Aesthetics and Politics of the Crowd in American Literature

Mary Esteve provides a study of crowd representations in American literature from the antebellum era to the early twentieth century. As a central icon of political and cultural democracy, the crowd occupies a prominent place in the American literary and cultural landscape. Esteve examines a range of writing by Poe, Hawthorne, Lydia Maria Child, Du Bois, James, and Stephen Crane among others. These writers, she argues, distinguish between the aesthetics of immersion in a crowd and the mode of collectivity demanded of political-liberal subjects. In their representations of everyday crowds, ranging from streams of urban pedestrians to swarms of train travellers, from upper-class parties to lower-class revivalist meetings, such authors seize on the political problems facing a mass liberal democracy - problems such as the stipulations of citizenship, nation formation, mass immigration and the emergence of mass media. Esteve examines both the aesthetic and political meanings of such urban crowd scenes.

• Covers a wide range of texts from 1840–1930 • Treats both the aesthetic and political dimensions of crowd representation • The methodology combines close reading, theoretical analysis and historical contextualisation

List of illustrations; Acknowledgments; Introduction; 1. When travellers swarm forth: antebellum urban aesthetics and the contours of the political; 2. In ‘the thick of the stream’: Henry James and the public sphere; 3. A ‘gorgeous neutrality’: social justice and Stephen Crane’s documentary anaesthetics; 4. Vicious gregariousness: white city, the nation form and the souls of lynched folk; 5. A ‘moving mosaic’: Harlem, primitivism and Nella Larsen’s Quicksand; 6. Breaking the waves: mass immigration, trauma and ethno-political consciousness in Cahan, Yezierska and Roth; Notes; Bibliography; Index.

‘The Aesthetics and Politics of the Crowd offers both an authoritative and informative analysis of the role of the crowed in American literature as well as a sequence of original and compelling readings of canonical authors.’ Journal of American Studies