Empire and the Literature of Sensation: An Anthology of Nineteenth-Century Popular Fiction

Multi-Ethnic Literatures of the Americas (MELA)

by Jesse Alemán (Editor), Ned Buntline (Contributor), George Lippard (Contributor)

Mid-nineteenth-century American literature teems with the energy and excitement characteristic of the nation's era of expansion. It also reveals the intense anxiety and conflict of a country struggling with what it will mean, socially and culturally, to incorporate previously held Spanish territories. Empire and the Literature of Sensation is a critical anthology of some of the most popular and sensational writings published before the Civil War. It is a collection of transvestite adventures, forbidden love, class conflict, and terrifying encounters with racial "others."

Most of the accounts, although widely distributed in nineteenth-century newspapers, pamphlets, or dime store novels, have long been out of print. Reprinted here for the first time are novelettes by two superstars of the cheap fiction industry, Ned Buntline and George Lippard. Also included are selections from one of the first dime novels as well as the narratives of Leonora Siddons and Sophia Delaplain, both who claim in their autobiographical pamphlets to have cross-dressed as men and participated in the Texas rebellion and Cuban filibustering.

Originally written for entertainment and enormously popular in their day, these sensational thrillers reveal for today's audiences how the rhetoric of empire was circulated for mass consumption and how imperialism generated domestic and cultural instability during the period of the American literary renaissance.
 

297 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2005

About the author

Jesse Alemán is an associate professor of English at the University of New Mexico, where he teaches nineteenth-century American and Chicano/a literatures. He earned his PhD from the University of Kansas and held a UIUC Latino/a Studies Program postdoctoral fellowship throughout 2002. During his tenure at UIUC, Alemán taught a nineteenth-century U.S. Latino/a literature class and completed two projects.

(from http://www.lls.illinois.edu/education...)

Reviews

[Katelyn Thompson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great selection of American sensation novels, and well-written and easily readable introductions to the genre and each author/story. Mostly focuses on Latinx and white race relations throughout the stories, and gender and its performance are recurring themes in the stories.

[Hilary · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book had the edited and highly readable versions of some seriously sensationalist literature from the 1800s. "Sensationalism", in case you don't know, pretty much means highly improbable adventure, candlelight, and heaving bosoms (although my teacher would fail me if he read that). If dime novels are your thing, read this book. If you're looking for light, escapist, bathtub reading, read this book. If you're a real stickler for Pulitzer prize-winning style... run far, far away from this book.