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Early American Studies: Discerning Characters : The Culture of Appearance in Early America by Christopher J. Lukasik (2010, Hardcover)
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About this product
Product Identifiers
PublisherUniversity of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN-100812242874
ISBN-139780812242874
eBay Product ID (ePID)84276640
Product Key Features
Number of Pages328 Pages
LanguageEnglish
Publication NameDiscerning Characters : the Culture of Appearance in Early America
SubjectUnited States / Revolutionary Period (1775-1800), General, American / General, Customs & Traditions
Publication Year2010
TypeTextbook
Subject AreaLiterary Criticism, Social Science, Psychology, History
AuthorChristopher J. Lukasik
SeriesEarly American Studies
FormatHardcover
Dimensions
Item Length9 in
Item Width6 in
Additional Product Features
Intended AudienceCollege Audience
LCCN2010-022354
Dewey Edition22
Reviews" Discerning Characters sets a new benchmark for literary, cultural, and intellectual historians intent on situating texts in a material and visual context."--Catherine E. Kelly, University of Oklahoma, A deeply researched, intelligent, and innovative look at the literary and cultural history of early America., "A deeply researched, intelligent, and innovative look at the literary and cultural history of early America."--Philip Gould, Brown University, " Discerning Characters sets a new benchmark for literary, cultural, and intellectual historians intent on situating texts in a material and visual context."-Catherine E. Kelly, University of Oklahoma, "Discerning Characterssets a new benchmark for literary, cultural, and intellectual historians intent on situating texts in a material and visual context."-Catherine E. Kelly, University of Oklahoma, "A deeply researched, intelligent, and innovative look at the literary and cultural history of early America."-Philip Gould, Brown University, "This book is clearly the product of substantial archival research, and its chapters move nimbly and knowledgeably through an impressive range of sources, from fictional to philosophical, textual to material, ephemeral to enduring. Weaving these different strains of evidence together, Discerning Characters provides a rich and subtle history of the ways that eighteenth-century American people and texts read distinction in the faces of their fellows."-- Eighteenth Century Fiction, This book is clearly the product of substantial archival research, and its chapters move nimbly and knowledgeably through an impressive range of sources, from fictional to philosophical, textual to material, ephemeral to enduring. Weaving these different strains of evidence together, Discerning Characters provides a rich and subtle history of the ways that eighteenth-century American people and texts read distinction in the faces of their fellows., Discerning Characters sets a new benchmark for literary, cultural, and intellectual historians intent on situating texts in a material and visual context., Discerning Characters sets a new benchmark for literary, cultural, and intellectual historians intent on situating texts in a material and visual context.
IllustratedYes
Dewey Decimal138.0973/09034
Table Of ContentIntroduction 1 PART 1. DISTINCTION AND THE FACE Chapter 1. Discerning Characters Chapter 2. Reading and Breeding Chapter 3. The Face of Seduction Chapter 4. The Face of the Public PART II. THE CHANGING FACE OF THE NOVEL Chapter 5. The Invisible Aristocrat Chapter 6. The Physiognomic Fallacy Epilogue Notes Bibliography
SynopsisIn this path-breaking study of the intersections between visual and literary culture, Christopher J. Lukasik explores how early Americans grappled with the relationship between appearance and social distinction in the decades between the American Revolution and the Civil War. Through a wide range of evidence, including canonical and obscure novels, newspapers, periodicals, scientific and medical treatises, and plays as well as conduct manuals, portraits, silhouettes, and engravings, Discerning Characters charts the transition from the eighteenth century's emphasis on performance and manners to the search for a more reliable form of corporeal legibility in the wake of the Revolution. The emergence of physiognomy, which sought to understand a person's character based on apparently unchanging facial features, facilitated a larger shift in perception about the meanings of physical appearance and its relationship to social distinction. The ensuing struggle between the face as a pliable medium of cultural performance and as rigid evidence of social standing, Lukasik argues, was at the center of the post-Revolutionary novel, which imagined physiognomic distinction as providing stability during a time of cultural division and political turmoil. As Lukasik shows, this tension between a model of character grounded in the fluid performances of the self and one grounded in the permanent features of the face would continue to shape not only the representation of social distinction within the novel but, more broadly, the practices of literary production and reception in nineteenth-century America across a wide range of media. The result is a new interdisciplinary interpretation of the rise of the novel in America that reconsiders the political and social aims of the genre during the fifty years following the Revolution. In so doing, Discerning Characters powerfully rethinks how we have read--and continue to read--both novels and each other., In this wide-ranging study of the intersections between visual and literary culture, Christopher J. Lukasik demonstrates how late 18th-century physiognomy transformed the relationship of facial characteristics to social distinction in early American culture.
LC Classification NumberBF859.L85 2011
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