The Aesthetics and Politics of the Crowd in American Literature

Mary Esteve provides a study of crowd representations in Americanliterature from the antebellum era to the early twentieth century. Asa central icon of political and cultural democracy, the crowd occupiesa prominent place in the American literary and cultural landscape.Esteve examines a range of writing by Poe, Hawthorne, Lydia MariaChild,Du Bois, James, and Stephen Crane among others. These writers,she argues, distinguish between the aesthetics of immersion in acrowd and the mode of collectivity demanded of political-liberal subjects.In their representations of everyday crowds, ranging fromstreamsof urban pedestrians to swarms of train travellers, from upper-classparties to lower-class revivalist meetings, such authors seize on thepolitical problems facing a mass liberal democracy – problems such asthe stipulations of citizenship, nation formation, mass immigration,and the emergence of mass media. Esteve examines both the aestheticand political meanings of such urban crowd scenes.