Democracy's Spectacle Sovereignty and Public Life in Antebellum American Writing

Democracy's Spectacle is an engaging, original and often disquieting account of popular sovereignty in the antebellum period and of the public culture that gave it shape and expression.y Greiman examines not only the forms of popular power that defined the experience of self-rule, but the ways in which this power preserved the residual aspect and effect of sovereign power in the capacity to punish its citizens.y Revealing the forgotten character of democracy in the early U.S., Grieman shows how the tyranny of the majority, the violence of the mob, and the corrosive force of public opinion borrowed from traditionary authority the power of exclusion-indeed assumed their authority through their exclusions.y In its searching look at narrative responses to the novelty and estrangements of democratic life, Democracy's Spectacle will find an eager audience within literary and American studies.-Elisa Tamarkin
In Democracy's Spectacle, Jennifer Greiman advances a complex, nuanced, and original argument about the contradictions of antebellum popular sovereignty and their virulent expression in public spectacles, and in writing and theorizing about such spectacles. This searching study will be compelling reading for those wondering about the roots of our current failures of political imagination.-Jonathan Elmer
"Greiman enhances our understanding of antebellum culture by exploring popular sovereignty's transformation of public life in the United States."-American Literature