Literary Interventions in the Campaign Biography considers campaign biographies written by major authors including Nathaniel Hawthorne, William Dean Howells, Lew Wallace, Jacob Riis, and Rose Wilder Lane. In so doing, it poses questions of increasing significance about how we understand the office as well as its occupants today.
Literary Interventions in the Campaign Biography considers campaign biographies written by major authors including Nathaniel Hawthorne, William Dean Howells, Lew Wallace, Jacob Riis, and Rose Wilder Lane. Whereas a number of cultural historians have previously considered campaign biographies to be marginal or isolated from the fictional output of these figures, this volume revisits the biographies in order to understand better how they inform, and are informed by, seismic shifts in the literary landscape. The book illuminates the intersection of American literature and politics while charting how the Presidency has developed in the public imagination. In so doing, it poses questions of increasing significance about how we understand the office as well as its occupants today.
"In this well-written and insightful book, Michael Blouin challenges our understanding of American politics, culture, and literature. He also persuades readers to pay better attention to books that have largely been ignored by literary critics. But rather than simply explain what we've been missing, Blouin explores how that strangely American genre, the campaign biography, can provoke important questions about authorship and aesthetics."
-- Carl Sederholm, Editor, The Journal of American Culture??
