BY THE SWEAT OF THE BROW by Nicholas K. Bromell ( 9780226075549 )

Item Details

Title:

BY THE SWEAT OF THE BROW
LITERATURE AND LABOR IN ANTEBELLUM AMERICA

By:

Format:

Hardback

List price:	£80.00
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ISBN 10:

0226075540

ISBN 13:

9780226075549

Publisher:

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

Pub. date:

1 November, 1993

Pages:

286

Description:

Bromell shows how various American writers scrutinized labour and reflected upon its relation to their own work of writing. He argues that American writers sensed a deep affinity between the mental labour of writing and such bodily labours as blacksmithing, mothering and growing crops.

Synopsis:

The spread of industrialism, the emergence of professionalism, the challenge to slavery - these and other developments fuelled an anxious debate about work in antebellum America. Nicholas Bromell discusses the ways in which American writers participated in this cultural contestation of the nature and meaning of work. In chapters on Thoreau, Melville, Hawthorne, Rebecca Harding Davis, Susan Warner, Harriet Beecher Stowe and Frederick Douglass, Bromell shows how writers scrutinized work and reflected upon its relation to their own work of writing. Bromell argues that American writers sensed a deep affinity between the mental labour of writing and such bodily labours as blacksmithing, mothering and growing crops. He also contributes to 19th-century social history by examining opinions on the nature of maternity, ideological efforts to devalue skilled labour, and the paradoxical idea that slaves sometimes found in their labour a mode of self-actualization within slavery. Combining canonical and noncanonical texts, primary source material and contemporary theory, "By the Sweat of the Brow" establishes work as an important subject of cultural criticism.

Publication:

Imprint:

University of Chicago Press

Returns:

Returnable

Some other items by this author:

BY THE SWEAT OF THE BROW (PB)

THE TIME IS ALWAYS NOW (HB)