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Shelley Streeby, American Sensations: Class, Empire, and the Production of Popular Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), xv + 384 pp., $24.95 (paper).
Students engaged in "the histories of race, nativism, labor, politics, and popular and mass culture in the United States" (xi) will find these issues brought together in Shelley Streeby's comprehensive research. This former dissertation's unequivocally proclaimed goal is to investigate the process and reveal the mechanisms of utilizing conventional language of midnineteenth-century mass literature for the purpose of empire-building.
The book provides an impressive body of the 1840-60s novels to support Streeby's broad generalizations about the social responsibility of writers. The texts selected for an interdisciplinary rereading belong to widely read and recognized authors, both male and femaleGeorge Lippard, Ned Buntline, A.J. H. Duggane, John Rollin Ridge, Metta Victor, Mary Denison, Louisa May Alcott. The author shows off an impressive erudition and strong logic, although sometimes the arguments sound fairly subjective: should we define genres-the category of language and literature-by an ideological term "imperial"? Nonetheless, Streeby's straightforwardly manifested concern with the problem of constructing American identity through sensational cultural and literary models, as well as her equitable observation about "the relative critical neglect of sensational literature" and "the isolation of sensational urban genres from imperial genres" (37) fairly...