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Volume IV comprises two sections dealing, respectively, with the development of pet culture and its evolution as a cultural institution over the course of the long nineteenth century, and with the variegated presence of domesticated (and feralised) animals in U.S. cities. Closely tied to the antebellum rise of the American middle-class family and the sentimentalisation of (certain) human-animal relationships, by the turn of the twentieth century American petkeeping had become the target of an expansive industry that offered everything from gourmet pet foods and fashionable accessories to healthcare and boarding services. This proliferation of companion animals also had a significant impact on urban life. Besides walking, sitting, or lying on sidewalks and being sold in city stores and on street corners, in cases of abandonment the animals swelled an ever-increasing population of canine and feline strays. Together with horses, pigs, cows, chicken, and urban wildlife, these animals fundamentally shaped the routines, rhythms, and general experience of nineteenth-century urban life for human city dwellers.
Wide-ranging, admirably researched, and accessible, this volume of essays locates women writers firmly in the center of the hurly-burly of literary and economic developments that made up the literary marketplace in nineteenth-century America. รข "Dr. Joanne Dobson, independent scholar and novelist. This remarkable collection by editors Earl Yarington and Mary De Jong contributes richly to the ongoing recovery of the works and methods of highly popular American women writers of the nineteenth century. Augmenting the body of scholarship on professional women writers, these essays showcase the ways in which best-selling female authors met the demands of a burgeoning literary marketplace. This c...
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In this rich interdisciplinary study, Hildegard Hoeller argues that nineteenth-century American culture was driven by and deeply occupied with the tension between gift and market exchange. Rooting her analysis in the period's fiction, she shows how American novelists from Hannah Foster to Frank Norris grappled with the role of the gift based on trust, social bonds, and faith in an increasingly capitalist culture based on self-interest, market transactions, and economic reason. Placing the notion of sacrifice at the center of her discussion, Hoeller taps into the poignant discourse of modes of exchange, revealing central tensions of American fiction and culture.