Book description
Literary histories typically celebrate the antebellum period as
marking the triumphant emergence of American literature. But the
period's readers and writers tell a different story: they derided
literature as a fraud, an imposture, and a humbug, and they likened it
to inflated currency, land bubbles, and quack medicine.
Excavating a rich archive of magazine fiction, verse satires,
comic almanacs, false slave narratives, minstrel song sheets, and
early literary criticism, and revisiting such familiar figures as
Edgar Allan Poe, Davy Crockett, Fanny Fern, and Herman Melville, Lara
Langer Cohen uncovers the controversies over literary fraudulence that
plagued these years and uses them to offer an ambitious rethinking of
the antebellum print explosion. She traces the checkered fortunes of
American literature from the rise of literary nationalism, which was
beset by accusations of puffery, to the conversion of fraudulence from
a national dilemma into a sorting mechanism that produced new racial,
regional, and gender identities. Yet she also shows that even as
fraudulence became a sign of marginality, some authors managed to turn
their dubious reputations to account, making a virtue of their
counterfeit status. This forgotten history, Cohen argues, presents a
dramatically altered picture of American literature's role in
antebellum culture, one in which its authority is far from assured,
and its failures matter as much as its achievements.
"The Fabrication of American Literature is fresh and
surprising in its arguments, and deeply learned in its scholarship.
Antebellum American literature, we learn, was not just interested in
the topic of fraudulence, it was itself fraudulent-and this is a good
thing. I am confident that readers will be deeply interested and
thoroughly impressed by Lara Langer Cohen's wonderful
accomplishment."-Christopher Looby, University of California, Los Angeles
Lara Langer Cohen teaches English at Wayne State University.
