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This book juxtaposes representations of labor in fictional texts with representations of labor in nonfictional texts in order to trace the intersections between aesthetic and economic discourse in nineteenth-century America. This intersection is particularly evident in the debates about symbol and allegory, and Cindy Weinstein contends that allegory during this period was critiqued on precisely the same grounds as mechanized labor. In the course of completing a historical investigation, Weinstein revolutionizes the notion of allegorical narrative, which is exposed as a literary medium of greater depth and consequence than has previously been implied.
E-Book Content
The Literature of Labor and the Labors of Literature juxtaposes representations of
labor in fictional texts with representations of labor in nonfictional texts in order to trace the intersections between aesthetic and economic discourse in nineteenthcentury America. This intersection is particularly evident in the debates about symbol and allegory, and the author contends that allegory during this period was critiqued on precisely the same grounds as mechanized labor. Despite the undeniable differences between literary characters and historical workers, the discursive possibilities for constructing the character of both fictional and nonfictional persons are strikingly similar. Both allegory and new forms of labor produced a version of personhood that seemed frighteningly flat, aflatnessthat attacked the substance of the work ethic and, indeed, the very foundations of American individualism. Using this contextualized model of allegory, Weinstein goes on to argue that texts by Hawthorne, Melville, Twain, and Henry Adams are best understood as both allegories of labor (that is, the allegorical representations of the nature and cost of being a laboring being) and labors of allegory (that is, the visibility of the author's work of representation). In the course of completing a historical investigation, Weinstein revolutionizes the notion of allegorical narrative, which is exposed as a literary medium of greater complexity and consequence than has previously been implied - a working authorial vehicle for engaged and at times socially turbulent thought.
CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN AMERICAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE
The Literature of Labor and the Labors of Literature
CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN AMERICAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE Editor: ERIC SUNDQUIST, University of California, Los Angeles Founding Editor: ALBERT GELPI, Stanford University
Advisory Board: Nina Baym, University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana Sacvan Bercovitch, Harvard University Albert Gelpi, Stanford University Myra Jehlen, University of Pennsylvania Carolyn Porter, University of California, Berkeley Robert Stepto, Yale University Tony Tanner, King's College, Cambridge University Books in the series: 88. Rafael Perez-Torres, Movements in Chicano Poetry — Against Myths, Against Margins 87. Rita Barnard, The Great Depression and the Culture of Abundance 86. Kenneth Asher, T. S. Eliot and Ideology 85. Robert Milder, Reimagining Thoreau 84. Blanche H. Gelfant, Literary Reckonings: A Cross-Cultural Triptych 83. Robert Tilton, The Pocahontas Narrative in Antebellum America 82. Joan Burbick, Healing the Republic: The Language of Health and the Culture of Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century America 81. Rena Fraden, Blueprints for a Black Federal Theatre, 1935-1939 80. Ed Folsom, Walt Whitman's Native Representations 79. Alan Filreis, Modernism from Right to Left 78. Michael E. Staub, Voices of Persuasion: The Politics of Representation in 1930s America 11. Katherine Kearns, Robert Frost and a Poetics of Appetite 76. Peter Halter, The Revolution in the Visual Arts and the Poetry of William Carlos Williams 75. Barry Ahearn, William Carlos Williams and Alterity: The Early Poetry 74. Linda A. Kinnah