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Scott Casper's Constructing American Lives is an important contribution to the understanding of a major genre of nineteenth-century American literature and historiography that has barely begun to be studied in a systematic way. This book is now the court of first resort.

Scott Casper's Constructing American Lives is an important contribution to the understanding of a major genre of nineteenth-century American literature and historiography that has barely begun to be studied in a systematic way. Lawrence Buell, Harvard University. Anyone interested in nineteenth-century American cultural production will need to read book. Journal of American History

This was hardly the case in the nineteenth century, argues Scott Casper, associate .

This was hardly the case in the nineteenth century, argues Scott Casper, associate professor of history at the University of Nevada, Reno, in his learned and profound new book, Constructing American Lives: Biography and Culture in Nineteenth-Century America. Hundreds, even thousands of biographies were written and published between 1790 and the turn of the twentieth century. But a great difference exists between nineteenth-century biography and our own. In the nineteenth century, biography had to work for a living; contemporary life-writing merely satisfies our curiosity.

Constructing American Lives book. Goodreads helps you keep track of books you want to read

Constructing American Lives book. Goodreads helps you keep track of books you want to read. Start by marking Constructing American Lives: Biography and Culture in Nineteenth-Century America as Want to Read: Want to Read savin. ant to Read.

Nineteenth-century American authors, critics, and readers believed that biography had the power to shape individuals' characters and to help define the nation's identity

Nineteenth-century American authors, critics, and readers believed that biography had the power to shape individuals' characters and to help define the nation's identity. In an age predating radio and television, biography was not simply a genre of writin. Nineteenth-century American authors, critics, and readers believed that biography had the power to shape individuals' characters and to help define the nation's identity. Bu kitaba önizleme yap . Kullanıcılar ne diyor?

Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999.

Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999. Lucy F. Townsend (a1).

Circulation records from local lending libraries, just one of a wide array of sources Scott E. Casper explores, reveal that diverse groups of readers, both male and female, thrived on reading biographies. That the biographies they embraced were neither good literature nor good history cannot, according to Casper, explain contemporary scholars' wholesale neglect of the genre

Scott E. Casper, American historian.

Scott E. Recipient Field Dissertation prize Yale University, 1992; Mellon fellow in the humanities Woodrow Wilson Foundation, 1986-1992, Peterson fellow American Antiquarian Society, 1990-1991, 98-99, Kahrl fellow Houghton Library Harvard University, 1993-1994, National Endowment of the Humanities fellow Winterthur Museum and Library.

Constructing American Lives: Biography and Culture in Nineteenth-Century America Nineteenth-century American authors, critics, and readers believed that biography had the power to shape individuals' characters and to help define the nation's identity. University of North Carolina Press.

Nineteenth-century American authors, critics, and readers believed that biography had the power to shape .

Nineteenth-century American authors, critics, and readers believed that biography had the power to shape individuals' characters and to help define the nation's identity. In an age predating radio and television, biography was not simply a genre of writing, says Scott Casper; it was the medium that allowed people to learn about public figures and peer into the lives of strangers. In this pioneering study, Casper examines how Americans wrote, published, and read biographies and how their conceptions of the genre changed over the course of a century.