Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790-1860 [Paperback]

Jane Tompkins (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0195041194 | ISBN-13: 978-0195041194 | Publication Date: May 29, 1986

What makes a literary classic? In "Sensational Designs" Jane Tompkins argues that it is not the intrinsic merit of a text, but rather the circumstances of its writing. Against the modernist belief that art, in order to be art, must be free from propaganda, Tompkins contends that writers like Brockden Brown, Cooper, Stowe, and Warner wrote in order to alter the face of the social world, not to elicit aesthetic appreciation.Thus, the value and significance of the novels, for readers of their time, depended on precisely those characteristics that formalist criticism has taught us to deplore: stereotyped characters, sensational plots, and cliched language.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"One of the important works of the year....Contains some of the best arguments I know on the conventionality of canon formation."--Michael J. Hoffman, American Literary Scholarship

"Wide-ranging, clearly written, cogently argued.... One of those stimulating and significant seminal studies sure to be frequently cited."--Choice.

"A major reassessment of nineteenth-century 'sentimental' novels...Force[s] us to reconsider on every page our usual notions of literary valuation, interpretive bias, and canon formation."--Western Humanities Review

"Sensational Designs...is an eye-opener for those too much obsessed by their own academic and cultural investments to understand the true stylistic and ideological complexity of nineteenth-century American fiction."--Philip F. Gura, Esquire

"A cogently argued redefinition of the entire process of literary study."--Women's Review of Books

About the Author

Jane Tompkins is at Duke University.

Product Details

• Paperback: 256 pages
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA (May 29, 1986)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0195041194
• ISBN-13: 978-0195041194
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.4 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #306,523 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Decisive 4 19th Century American Literary Studies & History, January 7, 2005

By 

Tony Thomas (SUNNY ISLES BEACH, FL USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790-1860 (Paperback)

Jane Tompkins' Sensational Design has had a revolutionary impact on the study and our understanding of "literature" and is also important to our understanding of 19th Century literature and women's studies as well. It is also nicely put together, clear, incisive, and provides the joy that comes from reading a book that explains things right that have been either explained wrong forever, or never explained before.

Literature and canon are artifical categories constructed after the fact usually under the impact of political, sexual, and social dominance, not necessarily literary achievement, whatever that is, and not at all readership. Tompkins explodes the idea of the American Literary Renaissance by pointing out that Sentimental Women Writers like Susan Warner and Harriet Beecher Stowe were selling hundreds of thousands of copies of their books, while Hawthrone never sold more than a few thousand coies of anything. Even with Hawthrone she explains how the different attitudes of readership and thought made the Marble Faun, a work much neglected and unread, be considered as his most important work in his time. She also does mention how history might not have been as kind to Hawthrone's place in literature had he not married his children into families that controled the Atlantic Monthly and what would become the Harvard Literature department.

More importantly, Tompkins unravels the mechanisms of the Sentimental novel such as Warner's The Wide Wide World and Stowe's immortal Uncle Tom. Tompkins explains how the text's purpose was the create "sympathy" seen in the physical form of tears, and how much of their approach corresponded with the notions of reality comment among its readership.
This work belongs on the shelf of anyone who seeks a serious knowledge of American literature and of 19th Century Culture. Moreover, the insights she provides on Uncle Tom make this book a must for people interested in the storm of literary discourse the book provoked among African American writers on one side and pro-slavery writers on the other.

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars How is a "Classic Text" Made?, September 6, 2000

By 

Kimberly Wells (Shreveport, LA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790-1860 (Paperback)

This is one of the books that started the new-historical feminist reinterpretation of books that suffer as "bestsellers" and "pulp" (often women's literature) as history (and a group of "insiders") decide what books go on to become "classics" and which do not. Tompkins reveals the historical and socio-political factors that affected Nathaniel Hawthorne's "classic" status and shows us why other authors, including Harriet Beecher Stowe and Susan Warner, slipped into relative obscurity and/or disfavor following their popularity during their lifetimes. She does not dispute the richness of Hawthorne's writing, rather points out that the "canon" changes over time, and the books that fall in or out are subject to individual and political pressures. For anyone who ever wondered "why aren't there more books by "women/minorities/--- fill in blank" in the canon, this book is AN explanation. Maybe not the only one-- but a good explanation in very accessible language.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Explodes the Canon!, December 27, 2008

By 

Justin Reilly (Boulder, CO) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790-1860 (Paperback)

The classic Sensational Designs is the best written of those books which led the challenge to the hegemony of the literary canon. Tompkins' arguments are clear and persuasive, not bogged down with a surfeit of theoretical clutter.