Philadelphia stories : America's literature of race and freedom / Samuel Otter.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Print version record.

Mathew Carey, Absalom Jones, Richard Allen, and the color of fever -- Ministers and criminals: Richard Allen, John Joyce, and Peter Matthias -- Benjamin Rush's heroic interventions -- Mathew Carey's fugitive Philadelphians -- Charles Brockden Brown's experiments in character -- Hugh Henry Brackenridge, and the irrepressible teague -- Edward W. Clay's "Life in Philadelphia" -- "The rage for profiles": silhouettes at Peale's Museum -- Philadelphia metempsychosis in Robert Montgomery Bird's Sheppard Lee -- The peculiar position of our people -- William Whipper and debates in the black conventions -- Disfranchisement and appeal -- Joseph Willson's higher classes of colored society in Philadelphia -- "Doomed to destruction": the history of Pennsylvania hall -- The portraiture of the city of Philadelphia, and Henry James's American scene the mysteries of the city: George Lippard, Edgar Allan Poe -- The fiction of riot: George Lippard, John Beauchamp Jones -- The condition of the free people of color -- The struggle over "Philadelphia": Mary Howard Schoolcraft, Sara Josepha -- Hale, Martin Robison Delany, William Whipper and James McCune Smith -- Whipper Frank J. Webb's the garies and their friends "A rather curious protest" -- Still life in Georgia -- History and farce -- Parlor and riot -- Philadelphia vanitas -- The social experiment in Herman Melville's Benito Cereno.

Samuel Otter's authoritative study considers the significance of geographical, social, and literary "place." It offers a model for thinking about the relationships between literature and history and among European American and African American writers. It challenges conventional narratives of American literary history. And finally, it establishes Philadelphia as fundamental to our understanding of not only the political but also the imaginative life of nineteenth-century America.

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