First Books ：The Printed Word and Cultural Formation in Early Alabama

Publication subTitle ：The Printed Word and Cultural Formation in Early Alabama

Author： Philip D. Beidler  

Publisher： University of Alabama Press‎

Publication year： 2012

E-ISBN: 9780817386405

P-ISBN(Paperback): 9780817309855

P-ISBN(Hardback):  9780817357306

Subject： K History and Geography

Keyword： American literature -- Alabama -- History and criticism., American literature -- 19th century -- History and criticism., Literature and society -- Alabama -- History -- 19th century., Literature publishing -- Alabama -- History -- 19th century., Authors, American -- Homes and haunts -- Alabama., Printing -- Alabama -- History -- 19th century., Alabama -- Intellectual life., Alabama -- In literature.

Language： ENG

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Description

This case study in cultural mythmaking shows how antebellum Alabama created itself out of its own printed texts, from treatises on law and history to satire, poetry, and domestic novels.
 

Early 19th-century Alabama was a society still in the making. Now Philip Beidler tells how the first books written and published in the state influenced the formation of Alabamas literary and political culture. As Beidler shows, virtually overnight early Alabama found itself in possession of the social, political, and economic conditions required to jump start a traditional literary culture in the old Anglo-European model: property-based class relationships, large concentrations of personal wealth, and professional and merchant classes of similar social, political, educational, and literary views.

Beidler examines the work of well-known writers such as humorist Johnson J. Hooper and novelist Caroline Lee Hentz, and takes on other classic pieces like Albert J. Picketts History of Alabama and Alexander Beaufort Meeks epic poem The Red Eagle. Beidler also considers lesser-known works like Lewis B. Sewalls verse satire The Adventures of Sir John Falstaff the II, Henry Hitchcocks groundbreaking legal volume Alabama Justice of the Peace, and Octavia Walton Leverts Souvenirs of Travel. Most of these works were written by and for societys elite, and although many celebrate the establishment of an ordered way of life, they also preserve the biases of authors who refused to write about slavery yet continually focused on the extermination of Native Americans.
 
First Books returns us to the world of early Alabama that these texts not only recorded but helped create. Written with flair and a strong individual voice, it will appeal not only to scholars of Alabama history and literature but also to anyone interested in the antebellum South.

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