Frantic Panoramas

Late nineteenth-century America and mass culture

From sensationalist tabloid newspapers to amusement parks to Wild West shows, the explosion of mass culture challenged traditional notions of literature's role in the public sphere. Literary writers of the time either reacted with disdain or conducted private experiments in style and form. In Frantic Panoramas, Nancy Bentley questions these narratives of opposition.

Transformation of literary engagement

For literary writers, Bentley explains, the confrontation with mass culture was less a retreat than a transformation, an ordeal through which habits of contemplative appreciation could be refashioned into new forms of critical thought. By grappling with the energies that marked mass culture, authors recognized kinds of human experience that were only then becoming visible as public. William Dean Howells shaped the plots of his novels around tabloid events like rail and trolley accidents and the public chaos of apartment house fires. Although Henry James was distressed at the way dime fiction had changed the very definition of literature, his meditations on mass culture led him to reimagine the novel as a collective "workshop" in which authors and readers jointly discovered new meaning. Bentley offers close readings of these and other writers such as Edith Wharton, James Weldon Johnson, Pauline Hopkins, and Gertrude Bonnin to demonstrate how leading artists took inspiration from commercial culture to create new and distinct literary forms.

Study of mass culture and literary culture

Drawing on original archival research and a historically grounded theory of realism, Frantic Panoramas is an innovative and comprehensive study of how the emergence of mass culture affected literary culture in America.