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.
Автор: Ross, Charles Название: Elizabethan Literature and the Law of Fraudulent Conveyance ISBN: 1138378747 ISBN-13(EAN): 9781138378742 Издательство: Taylor&Francis Рейтинг: Цена: 51030.00 T Наличие на складе: Есть у поставщика Поставка под заказ. Описание: This book investigates the origins, impact, and outcome of the Elizabethan obsession with fraudulent conveyancing, the part of debtor-creditor law that determines when a court can void a transfer of assets. Focusing on the years between the passage of a key statute in 1571 and the court case that clarified the statute in 1601, Charles Ross convincingly argues that what might seem a minor matter in the law was in fact part of a widespread cultural practice. Debt was more pervasive than sex, at least in the English Common Law. Ross examines how during the thirty years in which the law developed, Sidney, Spenser, and Shakespeare wrote works that reflect the ethical problem of crafting fair laws against fraudulent conveyancing, which was practiced by unscrupulous debtors but also by those unfairly oppressed by power. This study connects a major development in the law to the literature of the period, one that makes a contribution not only to the law but to literary studies as well as political and social history.
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