Frantic Panoramas: American Literature and Mass Culture, 187-192

by Nancy Bentley

Late nineteenth-century America saw an explosion in mass culture—from sensationalist tabloid newspapers to amusement parks to Wild West shows. Historians and critics have traditionally observed the advent of mass culture as undermining literature's central role in the public sphere. Literary writers of the time either reacted with a public show of disdain or retreated to conduct their own private experiments in style and form. In Frantic Panoramas , Nancy Bentley questions these narratives of opposition.

For literary writers, Bentley explains, the confrontation with mass culture was less a retreat than a transformation, an ordeal through which habits of contemplative appreciation could be refashioned into new forms of critical thought. By grappling with the energies that marked mass culture, authors came to recognize kinds of human experience that were only then becoming visible as public. William Dean Howells shaped the plots of his novels around tabloid events like rail and trolley accidents and the public chaos of apartment house fires. Although Henry James was distressed at the way dime fiction had changed the very definition of literature, his meditations on mass culture led him to reimagine the novel as a collective "workshop" in which authors and readers jointly discovered new meaning. Bentley offers close readings of these and other writers such as Edith Wharton, James Weldon Johnson, Pauline Hopkins, and Gertrude Bonnin to demonstrate how leading artists took inspiration from commercial culture to create new and distinct literary forms.

Drawing on original archival research and a historically grounded theory of realism, Frantic Panoramas is an innovative and comprehensive study of how the emergence of mass culture affected literary culture in America.

376 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2009

Reviews

[Dusty · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book, which draws its title from William Dean Howells's Hazard of New Fortunes and explores the reactions of Howells and other realists to the development of mass meda, is both peculiar and fascinating. Bentley's research doesn't extend too far past the realist texts themselves, which means the book is ultimately of more use to literary historians than scholars of mass media, but her pairings of authors (Henry James) and emerging cultural forms (posters advertising performing women) will certainly help teachers contextualize those texts for students unfamiliar with the era.

[Humphrey · Rating 4 out of 5]

The greatest virtue of this book, which has many, is the breadth of its coverage, both in the topics of its chapters and the material included in those chapters. Nancy Bentley is never content to remain within one or two primary texts; she moves fluidly and convincingly from one source to the next, building cases across multiple authors or multiple texts from the same author that are neither exceedingly restrictive nor, I believe, exceedingly diffuse.