Industry and the Creative Mind
The Eccentric Writer in American Literature and Entertainment, 1790-1860
Publication Year: 2012
Published by: University of Michigan Press
Cover
Title Page, Copyright, Acknowledgments
Introduction
In his 1856 memoir, Recollections of a Lifetime, the American publisher and author Samuel Griswold Goodrich recalled his frustrating and yet ultimately rewarding and dazzling encounters with gloomy, tortured poets. Goodrich’s descriptions dwell...
1. Anywhere but Here: Provincial Literature and the “Miseries of Literary Men”
Writing in the album of a friend in 1829, Edgar Allan Poe famously depicted himself as a profoundly alienated, isolated creature, at odds with the happy rhythms of ordinary life...
2. Personifying Vernacular Eccentricity: Joseph Dennie and the American Lounger
In a series of letters he wrote to his mother in the late 1700s and early 1800s, Joseph Dennie, the American author and editor of the prestigious Philadelphia journal The Port Folio, referred to himself repeatedly as a kind of geographical...
3. “Too Much above the Popular Level to Be Well Paid”: Edgar Allan Poe, His Peers, and the Rewards of Genius
The obituary notices that followed Edgar Allan Poe’s sudden death in 1849 were unanimous in understanding Poe as a kind of Chatterton, an erratic, isolated “genius” victimized both by society and by the philistine audiences and publishers...
4. An Idle Industry: Nathaniel Parker Willis and the Workings of Literary Leisure
In the 1790s, Joseph Dennie had described himself as a lover of “the desultory style,” a perennial “lounger,” and the author of works read by those wishing “to waste time.”1 Dennie’s leisure was an ironic, comical affair, but it was also never...
5. “As Crazy as a Fly in a Drum”: The Eccentric Woman Writer
It has been a long-standing conviction among scholars that antebellum women writers, by virtue of being women, were barred from association with the putatively lofty aesthetic realms of the Romantic, exilic artist. In Naomi Sofer’s words, midcentury...
Epilogue
In memoirs he published in the 1890s, William Dean Howells recalled his trip in 1860 to the center of American “Bohemia,” Pfaff’s Cellar in Manhattan. The young Howells, then a fledgling writer, was excited to go, for Pfaff’s was known...
E-ISBN-13: 9780472028429
E-ISBN-10: 0472028421
Print-ISBN-13: 9780472118366
Print-ISBN-10: 0472118366
Page Count: 328
Illustrations: 2 illustrations
Publication Year: 2012
OCLC Number: 801411062
MUSE Marc Record: Download for Industry and the Creative Mind
