Literaturvermittlung im Internet - Hyperfiction (German Edition)

Novelist: Wikis

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One can note a balance of opposing developments here: The 18th century witnessed the rise of increasingly realistic fictions while both, authors and critics defined the entire field of fictions as distinct from the historical. The development de-scandalised the market: Valuable fictions defended a higher truth, a truth beyond the flat, factual and historical truth of every-day experience. Theories of aesthetics praised the "imitation of nature" and the artist's almost divine power to create worlds of a deeper significance in the second half of the 18th century.

The previous conflict between historians and romancers was thus finally resolved: Valuable Fictions and true histories became two fields the modern nations needed. Literary journals and literary histories became the privileged media of a new analysis of literary art — the development that has been noted above as one of status and that eventually caused the 19th century conceptual change of the word literature. The market divide that led to the modern trivial production in the second half of the 18th century was the by product of this process.

The rise of pornography beginning in the s is an early sign for that divide. The change of words, the rise of the word "novel" at the cost of the rivaling "romance", remained a Spanish and English phenomenon. Readers all over western Europe had welcomed the novel la or short history as an alternative in the second half of the 17th century. Only the English and the Spanish had, however, openly discredited the old production. The change of taste remained a temporal phenomenon. Jane Barker explicitly advertised her Exilius as "A new Romance", "written after the Manner of Telemachus" in to which she added a preface on the scandalous new production one had to get rid of.

The term "novel" first peaked on the English market in the s, when the novel la manifested itself as the alternative to the older "romance". It lost its attractiveness with ensuing scandalous production in the twilight between truth and fiction. The s saw a second peak of "novels" with the first editions of classics of the genre and with new large scale "novels" in the style Eliza Haywood wrote. In the midth century it was no longer clear whether the market had not simply developed two terms: The late 18th-century brought an answer with the " romantic " movement's readiness to reclaim the word "romance" as term for explicitly grotesque and distant fictional settings.

Robinson Crusoe became a "novel" in that period [ 81 ] appearing now as a work of the new realism of fiction the 18th century had brought forth. The term "romance" was eventually restricted to love stories in the course of the 19th century. The theologian had not only dared to praise fictions; he had also explained techniques of theological reading, the interpretation of fictions: Christ had used parables to teach; ancient Milesians had used them to arouse sexual fantasies; France produced them at present to test the options of a less inhibited conversation between the sexes.

The decades around saw the appearance of new editions of Petronius , [ 84 ] Lucian [ 85 ] and Heliodorus of Emesa. Exotic fictions entered the market to give insight into the Islamic frame of mind. One read The Book of One Thousand and One Nights first published in Europe from to in French, and translated immediately from this edition into English and German as a contribution to Huet's history of romances. New classics added to the market: The English Select Collection of Novels in six volumes —22 is a milestone in this development, including Huet's Treatise with the European tradition of the modern novel that is, novella from Machiavelli 's to Marie de LaFayette's masterpieces.

Aphra Behn 's prose fictions had appeared as "novels" in the s and were reprinted in collections of her works which turned the scandalous authoress into a modern classic. New authors entered the market ready to use their personal names as producers of fiction: Eliza Haywood thus followed the footsteps of Aphra Behn in using her name with unprecedented pride.

The production of classics allowed the novel to gain a past, prestige and a canon. It called at the same moment for a present production of equal merits. A wave of midth-century works that proclaimed their intent to propagate improved moral values gave critics modern novels they could discuss publicly. Instead of banning novels, the efforts at reformation of manners that had begun in the s now led to their reform. Female authors and heroines were the first affected by the development.

Madame d'Aulnoy and Delarivier Manley became notorious examples of a bygone age of impudence. They had washed their dirty linen in public and used their novels to reinvent themselves and convert their own notoriety into fame. The new female heroines had to show intimacy and sensitivity where their early 18th century ancestors had been ready to appear in public in order to sanitize their reputations.

Intimate confessions and blushes filled the new novels, feelings of guilt, even where suspicions were groundless early 18th century heroines had defended their virtues and reputations flamboyantly even where they had gone astray. The modern heroines acted transparently, whereas their early 18th century counterparts had resorted to secret dealings in endless intrigues.

To become a fashion, if not the standard of modern behavior, the new personality features needed new social environments. Marie de La Fayette's Princesse had fallen into a desperate situation as soon as she risked the outrageous transparency to confess her feelings for another man to her husband.

Neither he nor his rival knew how to continue once all this was clear. Midth-century novels created alternatives: Other novels placed the new transparent heroines into equally new caring environments. Their families resisted temptations to marry them off against their wills, and men around them resisted temptations to seduce them in moments of weakness.

The message was that respect and care were to meet open-heartedness in a new age of sensibility. Other novels experimented with surprising acts of an enlightened rationality with which their protagonists could escape deadlock situations far worse than the one Marie de La Fayette's Princesse had produced with her confessions. Samuel Richardson 's Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded , composed "to cultivate the Principles of Virtue and Religion in the Minds of the Youth of Both Sexes" focused, by contrast, on the potential victim, a heroine of all the modern virtues vulnerable through her social status and her occupation as servant of the libertine who falls in love with her.

Eventually, she shows the power to reform her antagonist. The titular countess had to decide between two husbands after her first, believed to be dead, returned from a Siberian war captivity. Both her husbands, former friends, had to come to terms with the rational problem her situation presented and did it in a startling mixture of piety and modern philosophy. Male heroes adopted the new sentimental character traits in the s.

Laurence Sterne 's Yorick , the hero of the Sentimental Journey did so with an enormous amount of humour. The virtuous production inspired a sub - and counterculture of pornographic novels. Greek and Latin authors in modern translations had provided elegant transgressions on the market of the belles lettres for the last century.

The new production beginning with works like John Cleland 's Fanny Hill differed in that it offered almost exact reversals of the plot lines the virtuous production demanded. Fanny Hill is introduced to a life of prostitution, learns to enjoy her part and establishes herself as a free and economically independent individual — in editions one could only expect to buy under the counter. The titular hero realised how impossible it had become for him to integrate into the new conformist society.

Pierre Choderlos de Laclos 's Les Liaisons dangereuses shows the other extreme, with a group of aristocrats playing games of intrigue and amorality. The sentimental protagonists of the s had already surprised their readers and aroused a debate whether human nature was correctly depicted with these new novels. They discovered a truth of the heart one had not dared to deal with so far. The radical and lonely characters that appeared in the s and s broke with traditions and eventually needed entirely new back-stories to become plausible.

Childhoods, and adolescences had to explain why these protagonists should have developed so differently. The concept of character development began to fascinate novelists in the s. Jean Jacques Rousseau 's novels focused on such developments in philosophical experiments. The German Bildungsroman offered quasi-biographical explorations and autobiographical self examinations of the individual and its personal development by the s. A subcategory of the genre focused on the creation of an artist if not the artist writing the novel.

It led to the 19th-century production of novels exploring how modern times form the modern individual. The new 18th-century status of the novel as an object of debate is particularly manifest in special development of philosophical [ 93 ] and experimental novels. Philosophical fiction was not exactly new. Plato 's dialogues were embedded in fictional narratives. Works such as these had not been read as novels or romances but as philosophical texts.

The s saw new editions of More's work under the title that created the tradition: Voltaire utilised the romance to write philosophy with his Micromegas: Being a severe satire upon the philosophy, ignorance, and self-conceit of mankind , English His Zadig and Candide became central texts of the French Enlightenment and of the modern novel.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau bridged the genres with his less fictional Emile: It made sense to publish these works as romances or novels, works of fiction, only because prose fiction had become an object of public discussion. The public reception provided by the new market of journals was both freer and wider than the discussion in journals of philosophy would have been.

It had become attractive to step into the realm of fiction in order to provide matter for the ongoing debates. The genre's new understanding of itself resulted in the first metafictional experiment, pressing against its limitations. It expanded the author-reader communication from the preface into the plot itself — Tristram Shandy develops as a conversation between the narrative voice and his audience.

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Besides narrative experiments, there were visual experiments: Jonathan Swift 's A Tale of a Tub is an early precursor in this field — a work that employs visual elements with similar ambition — yet hardly a text in the tradition of the original novel or its rival the romance. By the beginning of the 19th century, prose fiction had moved from a field of questionable entertainment and precarious historicity into the centre of the new literary debate.

A new arrangement of the sciences taught at modern universities would finally protect the development. Theology, law, medicine, and philosophy had been the four traditional faculties. National literature became the object of a new university system in which the natural sciences acted as exact sciences , the social sciences with an outlook on the modern societies, and the humanities with a responsibility for history and culture. Literature in a definition that turned fiction into a central literary production would be a subject of the philologies in the latter segment of research.

The traditional task of literary historians, to review the sciences, was referred to the individual sciences and their respective academic journals. The general debate of literature was turned into an exploration of poetry and fiction. The modes of this exploration were new. Poetry had been analysed in poetological treatises asking for perfection and the rules that had to be mastered in the different genres. Early 18th-century critics had been ready to see the opera as the central poetic production of the modern era. One would differentiate between an Italian and a French style and consider an international production.

This arrangement was discredited in the course of the 18th century. Operas became music and the new literary histories offered in the 19th century focused on the greatest works an outstanding nation or language had brought forth. The new interest lay in interpretations.

Georg Gottfried Gervinus ' Geschichte der poetischen National-Literatur der Deutschen , published in its successive volumes between and became the European model with a project that rather resembled Pierre Daniel Huet 's Treatise on the Origin of Romances than any of the previous works on poetry or on literature the sciences. The new literary historian spoke about the cultural significance of the works he analysed. Unlike Huet Gervinus was solely interested in the works of his nation — whose history and mentality he hoped do better understand.

Other nations were of interest as they had threatened the intellectual development to be observed. Huet had given a world history of fiction. The 19th-century literary historian offered his project with the controversial promise to show how the nation had freed and found itself in its fictional production. The project persuaded scholars in France and Italy to bring forth similar histories for their nations whilst the Anglophone world remained rather uninterested. Hippolyte Taine eventually offered the first history of English literature at first in French, a year later, in in an English version that opened with a look back on the first century of modern literary history:.

The discovery has been made that a literary work is not a mere play of the imagination, the isolated caprice of an excited brain, but a transcript of contemporary manners and customs and the sign of a particular state of intellect. The conclusion derived from this is that, through literary monuments, we can retrace the way in which men felt and thought many centuries ago. This method has been tried and found successful. We have meditated over these ways of feeling and thinking and have accepted them as facts of prime significance. We have found that they were dependent on most important events, that they explain these, and that these explain them, and that henceforth it was necessary to give them their place in history, and one of the highest.

The essentially nationalistic analysis of poetical fictions had begun in Germany in the late s with a look back on three decades of international European fashions. German authors had embraced French " gallantry " as the essence of elegance and style. The country had gained nothing in the wars the European nations had supported on behalf of the Empire. The comparatively European decades of the Nine Years War , the War of the Spanish Succession and the Great Northern War had eventually left the intellectual elite disenchanted.

The discussion of the nation's poetry Johann Christoph Gottsched proposed at the end of the s formulated a national project connected with the offer to reform the entire market of German poetry. Johann Jakob Bodmer , Johann Jakob Breitinger , and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing adopted Gottsched's project and created the national discourse that finally gained national importance between and when Germany had to define itself in the events of the French Revolution and the ensuing Napoleonic Wars.

At the turn into the 19th century the first German territories implemented the new field of research in their national school curricula. Three decades later the first histories of German literature apperaed with proposals of the canon the young nation would need. The new topic was of immense interest thanks to its focus on the nation, [ 97 ] thanks to its controversial perspectives on the nation's history and identity, thanks to its attempts to reform the markets of fiction. The secularization pushed the new topic in France and Germany.

Literature offered worldly texts to be interpreted in schools and at universities where religious texts had been interpreted thus far. The Anglophone world adopted the new topic reluctantly.

London had developed a commercial production of the belles lettres, independent from the markets of Amsterdam and Paris, as early as the early s. The new market had found its own commercial criticism and did not need an academic variant with a distinctly national perspective.

Shakespeare had become an object of national veneration without the help of academic critics by the s. A rediscovery of the past had followed, with such doubtful discoveries as the Ossian -fragments. Critics discussed the belles lettres in fashionable English journals. Latest theatre performances were discussed in the newspapers at the end of the 18th century. The continental debate of "literature" remained uninteresting with all the academic institutions it promised to generate.

Great Britain did not need new national platforms. State politics and religion were open platforms — in Britain protected by modern press laws since the s. The continent had opted for a fundamental secularisation. Britain rested on the union of state and church, the USA on the opposite notion of private religiosity and a state that would not interfere. Neither country needed a topic for school lessons, in which worldly texts would be used in much the same way as religious texts had been used before. As for criticism of plays and fictions one could well live with the commercial criticism the market brought forth.

Germany invented a dualism of "Literaturwissenschaft", literary criticism formulated by university professors, and "Literaturkritik", literary criticism as to be found in the newspapers. A single word remained enough to speak of literary criticism in English. The new topic was eventually adopted both in Britain and the USA in the and s. The educational systems of the Western nations developed international standards. The Western canon became the project of a new international competition. To do this they eventually shared the same academic institutions that monitored, evaluated and basically organised their public controversies.

Literature and culture had been topics the nations could hope to handle with more competence than religion. The " republic of letters ", the "respublica literaria", the early modern scientific community that had coined the term literature had definied itself as the first truly pluralistic institution. The new topic spread in win-win situations.

The publishing industry promoted fiction, literature, Belletristik. New authors profited from the exchange. The reading public eagerly followed the debate and was ready to identify with the greatest authors now produced. New commercial rules began to structure the exchange. Most of the early 18th-century authors of fiction had published anonymously. They had offered their manuscripts and received all the payment to be expected for the manuscript.

The new copyright laws introduced in the 18th and 19th centuries [ ] promised a profit share on all future editions and created a new strategy with the revolutionary work, readers would initially hardly understand. One would publish such a work in a small first edition hoping for critics to prove it into an eternal classic. Novelists, a scandalous branch of authors a century ago, assumed entirely new roles as public voices; they spoke as their nation's conscience, as national sages, as far sighted judges in newspapers, in public debates and in entirely new celebrations of their public status.

The novelist who reads in theater halls and book shops is a 19th-century invention. Fiction gained new qualities in the exchange. The literary market gave rise to difficult texts that could not hope to be understood without critical interpretations. New novels openly addressed the present political and social issues — sure to be discussed by media focusing on the same issues.

Responsibility became a key issue: Responsibility of the citizen whose voice is heard or responsibility of the artist whose work future generations will have evaluate. The theoretical debate concentrated on the moral soundness of modern novels, [ ] on the integrity of individual artists, and on the provocative claims of aestheticists such as Oscar Wilde and Algernon Charles Swinburne who proposed to write " art for art's sake ", [ ] that is with a responsibility the present audience and the present critics might not be able to understand.

The up-market of works deserving to be read as "literature" was matched by a growing market of "popular fictions", "trivial literature" — a market that discontinued the production of chapbooks and grew in the former field of elegant belles lettres. New institutions like the circulating library affected the market as platforms publishing houses would address with their first editions. Fiction became the object of a new mass reading public [ ] protected, monitored and analysed by nation wide debates and by institutions the new states would hope to control.

The developments did not lead to stable definitions of the terms it popularized. The exchange affected from now onwards children at school as much as intellectuals who risked their lives in public controversies. The very word romanticism made direct reference to the art of romances. The genre, as opposed to the modern novel, experienced a revival with gothic fiction from Ann Radcliffe 's "romance" The Mysteries of Udolpho to M. Lewis ' "romance" The Monk The new romances not only attacked the modern novel's "natural" depictions of life, they destabilized the very differentiation modern critics had been trying to establish between serious classical art and popular fiction.

Gothic romances were grotesque. If the Amadis had troubled Don Quixote with curious fantasies, the new romantic tales were worse: The authors of this new type of fiction could be and were accused of exploiting all available topics to thrill, arouse or horrify their audience. These new romantic novelists could, at the same time, claim to explore the entire realm of fictionality. New—psychological—interpreters would read these works as encounters with the deeper hidden truth of the human imagination or the collective mind with all its recesses: Under a psychological reading, novels were said to explore our deeper motives by moving into the field of art and by trying to reach and transgress its limitations.

Artistic freedom would reveal what had not previously been openly visible: The literary world started to recognize the fragment as art potentially surpassing all the works of intricate composition. Terror and kitsch entered the productions with explorations of the trivial. The ancient romancers most commonly wrote fiction about the remote past.

The present had been the object of "curious" explorations in the hands of satirists like Grimmelshausen and Richard Head and in the hands of scandalous authors from de Courtilz de Sandras to the anonymous author of La Guerre d'Espagne Cologne: Walter Scott 's historical novel Waverley broke with these traditions. Scott did not write to satisfy the audience with temporal escapism, nor did he threaten the boundaries between fact and fiction with his works, as Constantin de Renneville had done with his French Inquisition Scott's work remained a novel, a work of art.

His work remained historical fiction, yet it questioned existing historical perceptions. The special power was partly gained through research: Scott the novelist, resorted to documentary sources as any historian would have done, but as an artist he gave things a deeper significance.

Attracting a far wider market than any historian could address, and rendering the past vividly, his work destabilized public perceptions of that past. Most 19th-century authors hardly went beyond illustrating and supporting widespread historical views. Slavery in the United States , abolitionism and racism became topics of far broader public debate thanks to Harriet Beecher Stowe 's Uncle Tom's Cabin , as whose characters provided personifications for topics that had previously been discussed mainly in the abstract.

Charles Dickens led the audience into contemporary British workhouses: Crime became a personal reality with Fyodor Dostoyevsky 's Crime and Punishment Women authors had dominated the production of fiction from the s into the early s, but few before George Eliot so openly questioned the position of women, the precepts of their education, and their social position. As the novel became the most interesting platform of modern debates—allegedly free, as art could claim to be in the modern secular western societies—a race began between nations to re- establish their national literatures with novels as the essential production that could link the present with the past.

Alessandro Manzoni 's, I Promessi Sposi did this for Italy; Russia and the surrounding Slavonic brought forth their first novels; the Scandinavian countries entered the race. With the new appreciation of history, the future also became a topic for fiction. Samuel Madden 's Memoirs of the Twentieth Century had been a satire, presenting a future that was basically the present age, but with the Jesuits secretly ruling the globe.

Edward Bellamy 's Looking Backward and H. Wells 's The Time Machine were, by contrast, marked by the idea of long term technological and biological developments. Industrialization , Darwin 's theory of evolution and Marx's theory of class divisions shaped these works and turned historical processes into a subject matter of wide debate: The individual , the potentially isolated hero, had stood at the centre of romantic fictions since the Middle Ages.

The early novel la had placed the story itself at the centre: And yet, the individual had returned with a wave of satirical romances and historical pseudo romances. Individuals such as Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders, Pamela, and Clarissa reintroduced the old romantic focus on the individual as the centre of what was to become the modern novel.

Ancient, medieval and early modern fictional characters lacked certain features that modern readers expect. Epics and romances created heroes, individuals who would fight against knight after knight, change as an Assyrian princess into men's clothes, survive alone on an island — whilst it would never see its personal experience as an individualizing factor.

The early modern novelist had remained a historian as much as the author of the most personal French contemporary memoir. As soon as it came to relating the facts and experiences, it became a question of proper writing skills. The modern individual changed. The rift can first be seen in the works of medieval mystics and early modern Protestant autobiographers: The sentimental experience created a new field of — secular, rather than religiously motivated — individualizations which immediately invited followers to join. Werther 's step out of the value systems that surrounded him, his desperate search for the one and only soul to understand him, inspired an instantaneous European fashion.

Napoleon told Goethe he had read the volume about a dozen times; [ ] others were seen wearing breeches in Werther's colour to signal that they were experiencing the same exceptionalism. The novel proved the ideal medium for the new movements as it was ultimately written from an individual's point of view with the aim to unfold in the silence of another's individual mind. The late 18th-century exploration of personal developments created room for depictions of personal experiences; it gained momentum with the romantic exploration of fictionality as a medium of creative imagination; and it gained a political edge with the 19th-century focus on history and the modern societies.

The rift between the individual and his or her social environment had to have roots in personal developments which this individual shared with those around him or her, with his or her class or the entire nation.

Any such rift had the power to criticize the collective histories the modern nations were just then producing. The new personal perceptions the protagonists of novels offered were on the other hand interesting as they could easily become part of the collective experience the modern nation had to create.

The novel's individual perspective allowed for personal reevaluations of the public historical perceptions and it allowed for personal developments that could still lead back into modern societies. The 19th-century Bildungsroman became the arena of such explorations of personal developments that separated the individual from, and then reunited it with, his or her social environment. Outsider perspectives became the field of midth-century explorations. The artist's life had been an interesting topic before with the artist being by public definition the exceptional individual whose perceptions naturally enabled him to produce different views.

Charles Dickens 's Oliver Twist and Gottfried Keller 's Green Henry focused on the perspectives of children , Fyodor Dostoyevsky 's Crime and Punishment added a drop-out student who became a murderer to the spectrum of special observers whose views would promise reinterpretations of modern life. The exploration of the individual's perception eventually revolutionized the very modes of writing fiction. The search for one's personal style stood in the centre of the competition among authors in the 19th century, now that novelists had become publicly celebrated minds.

The destabilization of the author-text connection, which 20th century criticism was to propose later on, finally led to experiments with what had been the individual's voice so far — speaking through the author or portrayed by him. These options were to be widened with new concepts of what texts actually were with the beginning of the 20th century.

Given the number of new editions and the place of the modern novel among the genres sold in bookshops today, the novel is far from the crisis predicted by critics such as John Barth himself a novelist or, more recently, Alvin Kernan. Literature has not ended in "exhaustion" [ ] or in a silent "death"; [ ] nor have bound paper books been superseded by such new media as cinema, television or such new channels of distribution as the Internet [ ] or e-books.

Novels such as the Harry Potter books have created public sensation among an audience critics had seen as lost. Novels were among the first material artefacts the Nazis burnt in public celebrations of their power in ; [ ] and they remained the very last thing they allowed their publishers to print as World War II ended in the devastation of central Europe: Hermann Hesse 's Steppenwolf and Carlos Castaneda 's Journey to Ixtlan had become cult classics of inner resistance. Whilst it was difficult to learn anything about Siberia's concentration camps in the strictly censored Soviet media, it was a novel, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn 's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and its proto-historic expansion The Gulag Archipelago that eventually gave the world an inside view.

The novel remains both public and private. It is a public product of modern print culture even where it circulates in illegal samizdat copies. It remains difficult to target. An Orwellian regime would have to search households and to burn every retrievable copy: The artefact that constituted one of the earliest flashpoints in the current cultural confrontation between the secular West and the Islamic East, Rushdie's Satanic Verses , exemplifies almost all the advantages the modern novel has over its rivals.

It is a work of epic dimensions no film maker could achieve, a work of privacy and individuality of perspective wherever it leads into the dream worlds of its protagonists, a work that uniquely anticipated ensuing political debates, and a work many Western critics classified as one of the greatest novels ever written.

It is postmodernist in its ability to play with the entire field of literary traditions without ever sacrificing its topicality. The democratic West depicted itself as the advocate of literature as the freest form of self-expression. The Islamic fundamentalist interpretation of the same confrontation has its own historical validity.

This interpretation sees a conflict between Western secular nations and a postsecular religious world. The Islamic republic eventually demonstrated how far the West had created its own inviolable if not sacred spheres in this development: Westerners can become atheists, they can admire any "blasphemy" as "art", but they cannot act with the same freedom in the field of history. Holocaust denial is criminalised in several Western nations in defence of secular pluralism. The Islamic nations protect, so goes the rationale, at the heart of the conflict a different hierarchy of discourses.

In a longer perspective, the conflict arose with the worldwide expansion of Western literary and cultural life in the 20th century. To look back, around fiction had been a small but virulent market of fashionable books in the sphere of public history. By contrast, in 19th century Europe the novel had become the center of a new literary debate. The 20th century began with the Western export of new global conflicts, new technologies of telecommunication and new industries. The new arrangement of the academic disciplines became a world standard.

Within this system the humanities are the ensemble of subjects that evaluate and organise public debate, from art and literature to history. Literature entered their public spheres almost automatically as the arena of free personal expression and as a field of national pride in which one had to search for one's historical identity, as the Western nations had done before. A number of literatures could challenge the West with traditions of their own: Chinese novels are older than any comparable Western works.

Other regions of the world had to begin their traditions as the Slavonic and Scandinavian nations had done in the 19th-century's European competition: South Asia [ ] and Latin America joined the production of world literature at the beginning of the 20th century. The run for the first black African novel to be written by a black African author is today a topic of research in postcolonialist literary studies.

The worldwide spread of the novel was monitored and mentored by such Western institutions as the Nobel Prize in Literature. The list of its laureates can be read as a chronicle of the gradual expansion of Western literary life. The contemporary novel defends the significance it had won by the s, and it has stepped beyond, into a new awareness of its public outreach. Nationwide debates can become international debates at any given moment. Today's novelists can address a worldwide public, with international institutions, prestigious prizes , [ ] and such far-reaching associations as the worldwide association of writers P.

The exiled author, [ ] who is celebrated by the international audience whilst he or she is persecuted at home is a 20th-century and now 21st-century figure. The author as keeper of his or her nation's conscience is a new cultural icon of the age of globalization. Back in the early 18th century some titles per year, that is between one and three percent of the total annual English production of about 2, titles, could be reckoned as fiction — a total of 20,, copies on the assumption of standard print runs of about 1, copies.

The percentage has remained relatively stable over the past 20 years, though the total numbers doubled from 5, in to 13, in According to Nielsen BookScan statistics published in [ ] UK publishers sold an estimated Adult fiction an estimated Children's, young adult and educational books, a section comprising best-sellers such as the Harry Potter volumes, made another Adult fiction made roughly a quarter of that value: A vibrant literary life fuels the market.

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It unfolds in a complex interaction between authors, their publishing houses , the reading public, and a literary criticism of immense diversity voiced in the media and in the nation's educational systems. The latter provide through their branches of academic criticism many of the topics, the modes of discussion and to a good extent the experts themselves who teach and discuss literature in schools and in the media. Modern marketing of fiction reflects this complex interaction with an awareness of the specific reverberations a new title must find in order to reach a wider audience.

Different levels of communication mark successful modern novels as a result of the genre's present position in or outside literary debates. An elite exchange has developed between novelists and literary theorists, allowing for direct interactions between authors and critics. Authors who write literary criticism can eventually modify the very criteria under which theorists discuss their works. Literary recognition can also be gained when novels influence thinking about non-literary controversies. A third option remains with novels that find their audiences without the help of critical debate.

Even serious novels can become the object of direct marketing strategies along the lines publishers usually reserve for "popular fiction". Many of the techniques the novel developed over the past years can be understood as the result of competition with the new 20th- and 21st- century mass media: Shot and sequence , focus and perspective have moved from film editing to literary composition.

Experimental 20th-century fiction is, at the same time, influenced by literary theory. Literary theory, arising in the 20th century, questioned key factors that had been matters of agreement in 19th-century literary criticism: The work of art eventually reflected all these aspects, and literary critics recreated them.

The ensuing debate identified a canon of the truly great works brought forth by each nation. It moved along with what philosophers called the linguistic turn: The text unfolded a meaning in the reading process. The question was, what made the literary text so special? The literary theorists argued that the literary criticism of the 19th century had not truly seen the text. It had concentrated on the author, his or her period, the culture that surrounded him or her, his or her psyche — factors outside the text, that had allegedly shaped it.

Strict theorists argued that even the author, hitherto considered the central figure, whose message one wanted to understand, did not even have privileged access to the meaning and significance of his or her own work. Once the text was written it began to unfold associations, no matter whether one was its author or another reader. The theory debate stepped forth in redefinitions of its project: Formalism , New Criticism , Structuralism and Poststructuralism late s through s became the major schools. The modes of analysis changed with each of these schools.

All assumed that the text had its own meaning, independent of all authorial intentions and period backgrounds. If a monkey were to use a typewriter without any understanding of his actions, he would sooner or later produce a Shakespearean sonnet among his random texts, a text whose beauty and meaning we would be able to appreciate. Each of these schools proposed a criticism that directed its attention to an understanding of this inherent meaning. James Joyce 's Ulysses became the central text that explored the potential of the new theoretical options.

The 19th-century narrator left the stage; what remained was a text one could read as a reflex of thoughts. The " stream of consciousness " [ ] replaced the authorial voice. The characters endowed with these new voices had no firm ground from which to narrate. Their audiences had to re-create what was purposefully broken. One of the aims was to represent the reality of thoughts, sensations and conflicting perspectives.

William Faulkner was particularly concerned with recreating real life, an undertaking which he said was unattainable. Once the classical authorial voice was gone, the classical composition of the text could be questioned: The argumentative structure with which a narration used to make its points lost its importance. Each sentence connected to sentences readers recalled.

Words reverberated in a worldwide circulation of texts and language. Critics would understand more of the possible allusions and supply them in footnotes. Virginia Woolf 's Mrs. Authors of the s— Robert Coover is an example—fragmented their stories and challenged time and sequentiality as fundamental structuring concepts. Postmodern authors [ ] subverted the serious debate with playfulness. The new theorists' claim that art could never be original, that it always played with existing materials, that language basically recalled itself had been an accepted truth in the world of trivial literature.

A postmodernist could reread trivial literature as the essential cultural production. The creative avant-garde of the s and s "closed the gap" [ ] and recycled popular knowledge, conspiracy theories, comics and films to recombine these materials in what was to become art of entirely new qualities.

Roland Barthes ' s analysis of popular culture, [ ] his late s claim that the author was dead whilst the text continued to live, [ ] became standards of postmodern theory. Novels from Thomas Pynchon 's The Crying of Lot 49 , to Umberto Eco 's The Name of the Rose and Foucault's Pendulum opened themselves to a universe of intertextual references [ ] while they thematized their own constructedness in a new postmodern metafictional awareness. What separated these authors from 18th- and 19th-century predecessors who had invited other textual worlds into their own compositions, was the interaction the new authors sought with the field of literary criticism.

James Joyce is said to have said this about the reception he designed for his Ulysses Asked about the possibility of " Cliff's Notes " to his writings, Rushdie answered that although he didn't expect readers to get all the allusions in his works, he didn't think such notes would detract from the reading of them: Mixed forms of criticism and fiction appeared: Whilst the postmodern movement has been criticized at times as theoretical if not escapist, it successfully unfolded in several films of the s and s: Pulp Fiction , Memento , and The Matrix can be read as new textual constructs designed to prove that we are surrounded by virtual realities, by realities we construct out of circulating fragments, of images, concept, a language of cultural materials the new filmmakers explore.

On the one hand, media and institutions of criticism enable the modern novel to become the object of global debate. On the other hand, novels themselves, individual books, continue to arouse attention with unique personal and subjective narratives that challenge all circulating views of world history. Their authors remain independent individuals even where they become public figures, in contrast to historians and journalists who tend, by contrast, to assume official positions.

The narrative style remains free and artistic, whereas modern history has by contrast almost entirely abandoned narration and turned to the critical debate of interpretations. Novels are seen as part of the realm of "art", defended as a realm of free and subjective self-expression.

Crossovers into other genres — the novel as film, the film as novel, the amalgam of the novel and the comic book that led to the evolution of the graphic novel — have strengthened the genre's influence on the collective imagination and the arena of ongoing debates. Personal realities have attracted 20th- and 21st-century novelists: Personal anxieties, daydreams, magic and hallucinatory experiences mushroomed in 20th-century novels.

What would be a clinical psychosis if stated as a personal experience — in one extreme example, Gregor Samsa, the point of view character of Kafka's The Metamorphosis , awakes to find that he has become a giant cockroach — will, as soon as it is transformed into a novel, become the object of competing literary interpretations, a metaphor, an image of the modern experience of personal instability and isolation. The term " Kafkaesque " has joined the term " Orwellian " in common parlance to refer not only to aspects of literature, but of the world.

Each generation of the 20th century saw its unique aspects expressed in novels. Germany's lost generation of World War I veterans identified with the hero of Erich Maria Remarque 's All Quiet on the Western Front and with the tougher, more existentialist rival Thor Goote created as a national socialist alternative. The Jazz Age found a voice in F.

Chuck Palahniuk 's Fight Club became with the help of the film adaptation an icon of late 20th-century manhood and a reaction to the 20th-century production of female voices. Questions of racial and gender identities , the option to reclaim female heroines of a predominantly male cultural industry [ ] have fascinated novelists over the last two decades with their potential to destabilize the preceding confrontations. The major 20th-century social processes can be traced through the modern novel: Lawrence 's Lady Chatterley's Lover had to be published in Italy in ; British censorship lifted its ban as late as Crime became a major subject of 20th- and 21st-century novelists.

The extreme confrontations of crime fiction reach into the very realities that modern industrialized, organized societies try and fail to eradicate. Crime is also an intriguing personal and public subject: Detectives, too, see their moral codes challenged. Patricia Highsmith 's thrillers became a medium of new psychological explorations. Paul Auster 's New York Trilogy crossed the borders into the field of experimental postmodernist literature.

The major political and military confrontations of the 20th and 21st centuries have inspired novelists. The ensuing cold war lives on in a bulk of spy novels that reach out into the realm of popular fiction. The unstable status of Israel and the Middle East have become the subject of Israeli and Arab perceptions. Contemporary fiction has explored the realities of the post-Soviet nations and those of post- Tiananmen China. Arguably, though, international perceptions of these events have been shaped more by images than words.

The wave of modern media images has, in turn, merged with the novel in the form of graphic novels that both exploit and question the status of circulating visual materials. The extreme options of writing alternative histories have created genres of their own. Fantasy has become a field of commercial fiction branching into the worlds of computer-animated role play and esoteric myth. Its center today is J. Tolkien successfully revived northern European epic literature from Beowulf and the North Germanic Edda to the Arthurian Cycles and turned their incompatible worlds into an epic of global confrontations that magically preceded all known confrontations.

Science fiction has developed a broad variety of genres from the technological adventure Jules Verne had made fashionable in the s to new political and personal compositions. Aldous Huxley 's Brave New World has become a touchpoint for debate of Western consumerist societies and their use of modern technologies. George Orwell 's focuses on the options of resistance under the eyes of public surveillance. Clarke became modern classical authors of experimental thought with a focus on the interaction between men and machines. A new wave of authors has added post-apocalyptic fantasies and explorations of virtual realities in crossovers into the commercial production of quickly mutating sci-fi genres.

William Gibson 's Neuromancer became a cult classic here and founded a new brand of cyberpunk science fiction. The contemporary market for trivial literature and popular fiction is connected to the market of "high" literature through the numerous genres that both fields share. The historic advantage of genres is to allow the direct marketing of fiction.

Whilst the reader of "high" literature will follow public discussions of novels, the low production has to employ the traditionally more direct and short-term marketing strategies of open declarations of their content. Genres fill the gap the critic leaves and work as direct promises of a foreseeable reading pleasure. The very lowest stratum of trivial fiction is based entirely on genre expectations, which it fixes with serializations and identifiable brand names. Ghost writers hide behind collective pseudonyms to ensure the steady supply of fictions that will have the very same hero, the very same story arc, and the very same number of pages, issue after issue.

Though a production not promoted by secondary criticism it is trivial literature that holds the big market share. The most important subgenres were in this period, according to Romance Writers of America data given on the basis of numbers of releases:. In a historical perspective one could be tempted to see modern trivial literature as the successor of the early modern chapbook. Both fields share a focus on readers in search of accessible reading satisfaction. Early modern booksellers stated a reduced vocabulary and a focus on plots as the advantages of the abridgements they sold.

The market of chapbooks disappeared, however, in the course of the 19th century. The modern adventure novel goes back to Daniel Defoe 's Robinson Crusoe and its immediate successors. Modern pornography has no precedent in the chapbook market; it goes back, again, to the libertine and hedonistic belles lettres, to John Cleland 's Fanny Hill and its companions of the elegant 18th-century market. Ian Fleming 's James Bond is a descendant of the anonymous yet extremely sophisticated and stylish narrator who mixed his love affairs with his political missions in La Guerre d'Espagne Marion Zimmer Bradley 's The Mists of Avalon exploits Tolkien, as well as Arthurian literature and its romantic 19th-century reflections.

Modern horror fiction also has no precedent on the market of chapbooks — it goes back into the high market of early 19th-century romantic literature. Modern popular science fiction has an even shorter history, hardly dating past the s. The modern trivial production can be said to be the result of the 19th-century constitution of "high literature". Where "high literature" rose under the critical debates of literature, the production that failed to receive the same critical attention had to survive on the existing markets.

Parodying Heroism in Nineteenth- Century Plays As has been suggested above, the hero-worship of the historical plays and melodramas of the nineteenth century, which has been criticized in academic studies of historical drama, was already a point of critique in the nineteenth century itself, for instance in the genre of burlesque. This was a popular, ephemeral theatrical genre of the nineteenth century, which Richard W. Schoch defi nes as a comic misquotation of original legitimate plays and performances Schoch, Introduction xxxiii; cf. A central feature to this end was the inversion of high and low; burlesque thus presents mean Persons in the Accoutrements of Heroes or describes great Persons acting and speaking like the basest among the People, as remarked already by Joseph Addison quoted in ibid.

Unsurprisingly, then, the great heroes of English history, too, like Elizabeth I or Henry VIII, found their place in the theatrical burlesque and were cut down to size. Once more on shore, how ill I feel! Thereupon, another Englishman remarks, critically: When Henry and Francis I have a boxing match later in the play, they show themselves to be decidedly unmartial: Each hits the other both fall down.

A burlesque like Robert B. The most obvious strategy by which this is achieved is that King Alfred is repeatedly referred to as a minstrel king. While this is an ironic comment on the fact that in the other plays e. That this is also probably a reaction to too much reverence towards Alfred in other plays can be guessed from the comment: Similarly, several of the Saxon warriors, such as Oswith, Alfred s aide-de-camp, who is described in stereotypical language as a pure Saxon ibid. While Sheridan Knowles s and all the other serious plays emphasize the famous myth of how Alfred burnt the cakes when hiding in a simple hut as a highly elevated scene that sees Alfred musing over his fate as king after initial military defeat, 22 in the burlesque Alfred has resigned from his position as king and has in fact become a common and fairly incompetent baker.

His thoughts on politics comically mix with those on bakery, turning them from high-minded idealism into nonsense and everyday worries: So poor as that? But in your state of impecuniosity, coming down Tis yours free gratis. A deed that shall perpetuate your name, [ ] Alfred. Now, that s kind. Of course the circumstance need ne er be known, That the presented loaf was not my own? This undermining of the heroic through the everyday and banal continues, for when Alfred goes to the Danish camp a deed which Tupper, for instance, celebrates as full of dangers, for a follower warns Alfred: Instead of the expected brave, wise and patriotic songs, he sings parodies of them using a common device of burlesque.

He undermines the heroic songs values, for 9. Cos in Trafalgar Square I want my statue there, To be paid for I don t say when, With the kings and warrior folk, The hearts of steel and oak, And the waxy-nature men; With Napier and Nelson brave A monument of stone to have; I mean to make a duty I mean to make a duty Along the lines of statues there Alfred expects as something rare His own may prove a beauty! Rather than a selfl ess, brave and devoted king, the burlesque s Alfred is a silly and excitable baker, who lays bare the hollowness of the values presented in the plays criticized, heroism chief amongst them.

Celebrating the Anti-Hero Charles II in Selected Nineteenth-Century Plays Though military heroes provided playwrights with popular topics, nineteenth-century plays did not confi ne their interest in history to Nelson, Alfred the Great or similar fi gures. Indeed, famous actresses such as Peggy Woffi ngton or Nell Gwynne, or immoral poets such as the Earl of Rochester, also featured on the stage. The past setting and the well-known anecdotes associated with these historical characters were used primarily for comic and entertaining situations, and the historical characters are not shown in a particularly fl attering light.

The temporal distance from these historical fi gures also made more racy treatments of morals possible, and it has been suggested that they may thus have served as a bowdlerised escape from the present Nicoll, Vol IV This seventeenth-century king seems to have been a particular favourite with nineteenthcentury playwrights, as he featured in more than thirty plays throughout the nineteenth century. These plays thus indeed celebrated him for his military prowess, as when a Puritan offi cer admits: When all was lost, and o er red heaps of kindred slain, his routed soldiers faintly pressed their fl ight, I saw young Stuart singly stand, and keep the centre of the fi eld, unhors d his helmet gone his buckler battered with innumerous blows, in his right hand aloft he shook a glittering sword, [ ] so terrible, and yet so glorious looke d the youth, that e en our roughest sons of war [ ] turned their blood-dyed weapons from his breast averse!

Diamond 30 Yet Charles II featured increasingly in a series of formulaic comedies set in the post-restoration period and concentrating on his notorious love life. To this end, the jovial monarch is usually in disguise and mixes with his people, meeting with all kinds of comic adventures and scrapes. Indeed, when Nell comes to the court Charles is decidedly upset: You at my court! His legendary womanizing in this play is presented as a mere invention: Cut from the Roundhead papers.

When Charles is anachronistically visited by Oliver Cromwell, he [a] ssumes a swaggering pose. I think that s like a king, he explains ibid. His joviality and selfassuredness is thus just an act. Moreover, his wife, Queen Catherine, who in the comedies rarely features at all, is here seen as a decid edly jealous woman. The military heroism so dominant in other nineteenth-century plays, then, has. Instead, in Walker s Nell Gwynne, the king and the Earl of Rochester even joke about his famous fl ight after the Battle of Worchester, comparing it to his present chase after Nell Gwynne, his most famous mistress: The rather dubious position of the Merry Monarch is confi rmed, as he is not even particularly successful with the women he pursues.

Riches power rank should be yours. I understand too well their price. No splendour can shut out the truth gloss over the infamy [ ]. No, I would sooner be the virtuous wife of an honest farmer, than the mistress of the proudest head that wears a crown. Addison 14 By serving as a joke, this comparison also highlights the unsuitability of Charles s present occupation, which is not what one would expect of an English king. Indeed, this is repeatedly emphasized in the plays. As Charles usually pursues the beautiful young girls incognito, often rivalling other suitors, he repeatedly has to suffer undignifi ed situations, as when in Henry Robert Addison s The King s Word he fl irts with the pretty Kate and is afraid of being caught by her husband: I ll jump out of the window!

Impossible, he will see you. Impossible, he will enter it. Happy thought this wardrobe? How small is now the empire of a king! Addison 15 As in this case, Charles repeatedly comments on the unsuitability of his adventures himself, thus highlighting them for the audience and creating comic effect cf.

Indeed, so do the other characters who share his adventures, for when he discovers Charles in the ward robe, Kate s husband refuses to believe that this is indeed the king, at the same time, however, voicing an ideal of how a king should behave: No, no; I am not to be imposed upon; the King, though he is a Stuart, is an upright Prince a man of honour, as his usher told me; not a vile intriguing base seducer.

You are not the King Addison In other plays, this criticism is repeated cf. Walker 18 and confi rmed by the silly situations that Charles fi nds himself in, for he frequently has to hide in cupboards and to appease jealous husbands and lovers cf. Macfarren s King Charles II, While this is clearly also a concession to nineteenth-century morals which in comparison to those of the Restoration were much more narrow, so that the period and its protagonists had to be bowdlerized to become suitable for presentation on the stage , as a result Charles II is thwarted even in this, his own particular fi eld.

In Walker s play Nell Gwynne, the eponymous heroine, too, constantly escapes his advances and does so until the end of the play. By contrast, the girls other suitors are usually successful, and Charles is left with the position of the graceful loser, who, as in Jerrold s The Bridge of Ludgate, pays for the wedding as a surrogate father of the bride: Compared to Nelson, who was shown to succeed in everything, Charles II seems decidedly anti-heroic.

Nevertheless, Charles II is presented as a likable and personable character in the plays. It is noticeable that not only the women who resist his advances but also practically everyone else likes the disguised monarch. Thus, in Payne s Charles the Second, Mary s successful suitor Edward becomes very jealous when he sees how Mary reacts to his rival: Mary apart to Edward. He certainly has something genteel in his air.

This unfortunate man may, perhaps, belong to decent people. Egad, I must get him off, or he ll win his pretty jailer, culprit as she thinks him. Mary taking Edward apart. How penitent he seems, and his countenance is rather amiable too! His positive personal qualities are confi rmed by the ease with which Charles joins common people for drinks in taverns and talks to them on an equal footing. The Charles II of nineteenth-century comedies is particularly remembered for his less than exemplary private life and his personal failings, which entertain rather than awe.

Considering nineteenth-century theatre s preoccupation with the domestic lives, also of historical characters Watt , however, this turn from the heroic is not surprising. Rather, it would seem that the voyeuristic wish to see a famous person in his undress Thomas Moore, quoted in Huber and Middeke that is so dominant in many late twentieth and early twenty-fi rst century bioplays is also a prominent feature here. Charles II, a king whose posthumous reputation in popular culture largely rests on his alleged personal charms and sexual prowess, fi tted this interest particularly well.

Conclusion As popular entertainment, nineteenth-century theatre offered a variety of attitudes toward and images of historical heroism and heroes. Contrary to its bad reputation, it was not a form of entertainment characterized by an unthinking hero-worship only.

The celebration of historical military leaders, such as Horatio Nelson or King Alfred the Great, was an important feature of certain genres, and thus, nautical melodramas such as Edward Fitzball s Nelson; or the Life of a Sailor celebrated past heroics. Yet this military heroism was also often accompanied by other qualities, beyond the mere military, a care for the weak or the sacrifi ce of the hero s private happiness, which also stressed the protagonist s human qualities.

In particular, the burlesque, a popular metatheatrical genre questioned the hero-worship of other plays, as plays such as Robert B. Moreover, by also concentrating on the far from exemplary private lives of historical kings and celebrities, fi rst and foremost King Charles II, nineteenth-century theatre also revealed a voyeuristic pleasure in the private lives of historical fi gures. As the Merry Monarch was seen in a host of very human, embarrassing situations, he was remembered in comedies as a very loveable and affable man, far removed from exemplary heroes like Nelson.

Considering the great diversity of nineteenth-century theatre, a form that consisted of thousands of plays, written by many different authors and in a variety of different genres, this fi nding is not surprising, for recent studies of nineteenth-century theatre have repeatedly stressed its wide range of different forms, themes and attitudes. Just as diverse as nineteenth-century theatre itself, however, are probably the reasons why this form of entertainment should be criticized in general for what is felt to be its undue reverence for historical heroes.

Firstly, as popular entertainment, nineteenth-century theatre is often felt to be a dark abyss Moody , a vast array of performing dogs, stage volcanoes, villainous usurpers, and other irrepressible heroes ibid. Nineteenth-century theatre is then only read through a few select plays which are said to represent theatre as a whole; in particular melodrama, a genre long infamous for its excess Schmidt 9 , is often, it seems, seen as typical here. Therefore, there is still an astonishing lack of knowledge of the varieties of entertainment on offer.

Secondly, it seems that the distance from nineteenth-century theatre has often been exaggerated deliberately, not only by G. Shaw and his contemporaries cf. It would seem that in a deliberate attempt to distance themselves from older, and more importantly, popular forms of entertainment, the changes in historical drama have perhaps been over- emphasized both by playwrights and scholars. Moreover, the postmodern urge to be different from the past may have obscured the view for older forms of antiheroism and parodies of heroism in popular historical culture. Her special areas of interest include children s literature, history and literature, and nineteenth-century popular culture.

Immer and van Marwyck On contemporary drama as high culture, cf. Huber and Middeke; Berninger, Formen. Richard Palmer shows how Marxism and feminism have also made a similar impact on historical drama s treatment of past characters Ch. Shaw or Oscar Wilde, the new drama, were said to represent the end of the theatre s demise.

These usually show literary, i. Moreover, some genres, such as melodrama, were more obviously popular than others. Berninger, Formen 47 , I adopt a broad approach towards the genre as popular historiography in the following. This approach is supported by the general pervasiveness of nineteenth-century popular historical culture plays were considered an important means of teaching history; cf.

Schoch, Theatre as well as the notorious vagueness of nineteenth-century theatrical genres cf. However, as the theatre changed considerably in the course of the century, I have selected most of the examples from the earlier half of the century to achieve some coherence. Yet it seems that a commander like Nelson cannot possibly be shown to lose. For the different functions of the comic, lower-class characters, cf. A Patriotic Play , show great similarities in that they all follow a similar plot line: They fi rst emphasise the diffi cult situation of the Saxons under Danish rule, show Alfred in hiding, his visit to the Danish camp in disguise where he acquires important information, and fi nally his triumphant defeat of the Vikings.

Moreover, they all share the key episode: Nevertheless, they are quite different, as de Redcliffe s historical play, for instance, is a tragic verse play with literary ambitions which does not seem to have been staged. James Sheridan Knowles was a successful professional playwright also of melodramas, whose plays were produced at Drury Lane, then one of the patent theatres.

This difference is readily apparent in the design of the plays. In comparison to Fitzball s play, however, Knowles s, in spite of its melodramatic characteristics, seems more literary, as the more upmarket theatre, the dedication to William IV and the use of iambic pentameter reveal. We are wholly quits! Coyne, Presented at Court ca. Others include pantomime, burlesque and opera, the latter a more high-brow theatrical genre. For a list of plays cf. The King s Word. Pantomimes, Extravaganzas and Burlesques. Alfred the Great; or, The Minstrel King: Peter the Great; or, The Wooden Walls: Richard Phillips, Coyne, Joseph S.

A Comedy, in Two Acts. Nelson; or The Life of a Sailor: A Drama, in four Acts. The Bride of Ludgate: A Comic Drama, in Two Acts. A Comedy in Two Acts. Alfred the Great; or, The Patriot King. James Ridgway, Macfarren, G. Cramer, Beale, Moncrieff, William T. And The Tobit s Dog. John Maddison Morton and William T. Dick s Standard Play, [? Charles the Second; or, The Merry Mon arch. A Comedy, in Three Acts. Longman, Redcliffe, Viscount Stratford de.

helden. heroes. héros.

Alfred the Great at Athelnay: An Historical Play with a Preliminary Scene. Or, Before and Behind the Curtain: Brettell, ProQuest English Drama. The Hero Rises Up: The Death of Nelson. Variations of a Genre: The British History Play in the Nineties. British Drama of the s. Anglistik und Englischunterricht Bernard Reitz und Mark Berninger.

Wissenschaftlicher Verlag, Black Adder: The Social and Literary Context. The Rev els History of Drama in English. Victorian Spectacular Theatre, Boston: The Contending Discourses of Melodrama. Jane Moody and Daniel O Quinn. London Theatregoing, Iowa City: U of Iowa P, Elizabeth.

Universal Pictures Germany []. National Heroes and National Identities: Scotland, Norway and Lithuania. Transferring the King and the Actress to the Stage: Transfer in English Studies. Sabine Coelsch-Foisner et al. The Return to Camelot. Chivalry and the English Gentleman. Yale UP, Hammerschmidt, Hildegard. Das historische Drama in England: Humanitas, Huber, Werner, and Martin Middeke. Biography in Contemporary Drama. Contemporary Drama in English 3. Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, Debates in Stuart History.

Konzeptionelle und fi gurative Paradigmen des Helden. Immer and van Marwyck. Elizabeth I in Film and Television: A Study of the Major Portrayals. Shaw and the Nineteenth-Century Theatre. Prince ton UP, Melman, Billie. The Culture of History: English Uses of the Past, Oxford: Life-Writing, Historical Consciousness, and Postmodernism.

Middeke and Werner Huber. The State of the Abyss: A History of English Drama, Vol. Early Nineteenth Century Drama Cambridge: Late Nineteenth Century Drama Cambridge: The Contemporary British History Play. Greenwood, Reiling, Jesko, and Carsten Rohde. Zur Ambivalenz des Heroischen im Jahrhundert und seine Helden: Literarische Figurationen des Post- Heroischen.

Carl Winter, Schoch, Richard W. Eine Kulturgeschichte der englischen Literatur: Von der Renaissance zur Gegenwart. Sony Pictures Home Entertainment [ ]. The Making of the Modern History Play. University Microfi lms Int. He is no Washington, Lincoln, or Kennedy. If he is remembered at all today, it is because he delivered the longest inaugural address and then served the shortest term of all presidents so far.

During his almost two-hour-long speech, he caught pneumonia and died 31 days later. But if his presidency was thus rather uneventful, the campaign that preceded it was truly remarkable not only because the expression O. Much more importantly, the campaign was a turning point in American politics: Replete with party nominating conventions, campaign songs, torchlight parades, and overblown electioneering rhetoric, the Presidential campaign in set the standard for all elections to follow Watson In fact, breaking with the principles of eighteenth-century republicanism that forbade presidential candidates to promote their own cause directly, Harrison eventually became an active part of the campaign and delivered various speeches in order to counter accusations of feebleness and lay out his understanding of the offi ce.

This transformation of campaign culture was the logical result of developments of the s and s. Under the presidency of Andrew Jackson, the right to vote spread beyond the propertied elite to all white men Collins 93 , so that candidates no longer had a small number of gentlemen to convince of their qualities, but had to appeal to masses of voters, most of whom belonged to the lower classes.

Moreover, because of increasingly fi erce opposition to Jackson s Democratic-Republican Party, a number of parties were founded during these years whose candidates ran against the Democratic-Republican ones in local, state, and national elections. During the early s the Whig Party emerged over the outcry over Jackson s war against the Bank of the United States, which many regarded as an act of executive usurpation and thus a violation of republican values Watson Initially, the Whig Party was only loosely organized and internally divided.

In the presidential election of , for example, it ran four candidates against Jackson s vice president, Martin Van Buren, who therefore won comfortably. Under the impression of this defeat, the Whigs regrouped, ran only one candidate, Harrison, for the election, and defeated Van Buren after a campaign in which, as former president John Quincy Adams complained, everything [ ] reach[ed] a new level qtd. Anticipating the way in which, years later, George W. Bush, the offspring of a wealthy New England family, would be transformed into a Texas rancher, General William Henry Harrison, the son of a Virginia planter who had signed the Declaration of Independence, was turned into a poor Western farmer who lived in a simple log cabin and enjoyed nothing more than a glass of hard cider.

To remind voters of these characteristics constantly and to exploit the opportunities they offered, Whig campaign events invariably featured models of log cabins that were carried around by supporters or placed on fl oats, and enormous quantities of hard cider were given out for free. The Whigs enormous efforts to win and the Democrats equally organized attempt to retain the presidency mobilized voters to such an amazing degree that voter turnout increased dramatically from 58 percent in to Van Buren, who won only 60 electoral votes compared to Harrison s , received almost , more votes than in the.

The new forms of campaigning had truly mobilized the masses. Because of the blatant rebranding of Harrison and the spectacle the Whigs orchestrated, most historians have not been kind in their evalu ations of the campaign. Robert Gray Gunderson, who has studied it in more detail than any other scholar, concludes that the Whigs electioneering was based on a contemptuous evaluation of the intelligence of the people Gunderson , and Dorothy Burne Goebel argues similarly that the campaign was successful because it offered entertainment to people suffering from a dearth of amusement Goebel This assessment has proved so powerful that, in her recent biography of Harrison, Gail Collins still calls the campaign one of the most ridiculous [ones] in history and reiterates the claim that the Whigs had no platform Collins 4, This, however, is not true, as Harry L.

Watson and Michael Holt, among others, have shown. As Holt puts it, [The Whigs] constantly reminded voters that there was a depression, that the Democrats had caused it, that Van Buren argued that the government should do nothing about it, and that a Whig triumph was necessary to end it Holt, Rise Moreover, the salvation of liberty and republican self-government constituted the Whigs second important theme. Their portrayals of Van Buren as a dissipated, effete monarch reminded voters that Democrats represented executive despotism ibid.

To offer an alternative, the Whigs portrayed themselves as the party of probity, respectability, morality, and reason ibid. All in all, then, the Whigs suggested that they were on a crusade to save not only the prosperity but also the liberty and the morals of the people ibid. Thus, Holt concludes that the contention that there were no issues in the election is untenable Holt, Election Whigs did demonstrate real genius in generating enthusiasm for Harrison, but they deployed far more than hoopla Holt, Rise I investigate how the representation of William Henry Harrison during the campaign served to communicate these issues, how, in other words, the values claimed and the promises made by the Whigs were embodied by the persona they constructed for their presidential candidate.

I argue that Harrison was cast as the legitimate successor to George Washington and that he was heroized as a farmer-soldier in the tradition of the Roman Cincinnatus, to whom Washington himself had frequently been likened since the s. This specifi c heroization was crucial for the success of the campaign because it turned Harrison into a representative of exactly the republican values of disinterested politics and commitment to the common good that the Democrats had allegedly violated and that the Whigs claimed for themselves. His election thus held the promise of returning to these principles and remedying the corruption associated with Van Buren.

Hence, Michael Holt s claim that no matter who the Whigs ran for president in , he was going to win because the presidential victory was simply a facet of a genuinely sweeping party victory ibid. He is right that the Whigs did not only win the presidential election but triumphed throughout in local and state elections as well, but that was because Harrison provided a success formula for Whig candidates at all levels.

Holt disregards that candidates at the state and local level fashioned themselves as Harrison did from onward. They could not claim heroism for themselves as they did for Harrison, but they sought to present themselves as embodying the same virtues that Harrison exemplarily represented. As Gail Collins has put it, everybody was going log cabin Collins While it would be a valuable endeavour to investigate the appropriation of this specifi c habitus by other Whig candidates, the focus of this essay is much narrower.

I restrict myself to the heroization of Harrison and concentrate on his representation in popular songs because they were arguably the most important element of the campaign. This popular form, I wish to argue, had a profound impact on the image of Harrison. He was projected as a Cincinnatus fi gure but not in the still rather aristocratic fashion of George Washington, who had been predominantly heroized in neoclassical poems.

Instead, the Cincinnatus model was popularized in two different yet interrelated ways. First, the Roman roots of the heroic model were downplayed because many of the voters the Whigs were addressing were men without classical education. While there are songs and poems that explicitly mention the Roman hero, others do without this reference and simply project Harrison as a farmer who leaves the plough to do his duty.

Second, the Cincinnatus model was popularized in that Harrison was not cast as a gentleman farmer, as Washington invariably was around , but as a common farmer who was poor rather than rich. Even Washington, as we will see, was increasingly imagined as a simple farmer during these years. My argument unfolds in the following way. I begin by discussing the importance of popular songs for the campaign.

While presidents and presidential candidates had been celebrated in songs from the s onward, the campaign of was the moment where songs replaced poems as the prime medium of heroization. Having established this shift, I then turn to the heroization of Harrison, who was already considered a military hero prior to the campaign and thus lent himself to further heroization. I fi rst discuss how some songs associated him with Andrew Jackson in order to attract disaffected Democratic supporters and then how a much larger number of songs linked him to Washington.

Afterwards I explore in detail how Harrison was cast as a popularized Cincinnatus. A quick discussion of how Van Buren was represented in the songs will then lead me to the conclusion that it was Harrison s heroic image that gave the Whigs the mass appeal they needed to win the election. From Neoclassical Poems to Popular Songs Looking back at the campaign a couple of years later, the editor of a Democratic journal remarked: Some of the songs I shall never forget.

They rang in my ears wherever I went, morning noon [sic] and night. It worried, annoyed, dumbfounded, crushed the Democrats, but there was no use trying to escape. It was a ceaseless torrent of music, still beginning, never ending. These and other observers highlighted the omnipresence and apparent impact of campaign songs because they were such a novelty. Collective singing had been an important part of the political rites of the republic since its inception, but in it reached a completely new level, as the number of campaign songs increased exponentially and the form became the dominant genre for the heroization of the candidate.

They were published, usually anonymously, in one of the many local newspapers and then, if others found them appealing, reprinted in others. Often paratextual information suggested a mel ody to which the poem could be sung, but it was primarily intended to be read. As far as form is concerned, virtually all poems on presidents from that period follow neoclassical conventions.

They are usually written in an elevated style and make frequent use of archaic words and phrases. Many of thes e poems can be classifi ed as odes, and as is typical of this genre, apostrophes and exclamations abound, and so do references to the muses and to ancient history and classical mythology.

The following poem, which was published in the Political and Sentimental Repository from Dover, New Hampshire, in June , is representative of the form and content of these poems: Pride of the world! Whose awful name the tyrant dreads to hear, And startled envy drops the bloody spear, Say, can the Muse confess the rap trous fire, Nor sound thy praises on the tuneful lyre? What fl owing numbers should adorn the string! When fi rst from Britain s shore involv d in blood, Black war rush d vengeful o er the billowy fl ood! The murd rous crew, aghast, confess d the alarm, Nor dar d the vengeance of his wasting arm, Round every plain unerring fate he sends, And death turns traitor to pursue his friends, Peace reigns again: And see from smiling skies, Returning freedom to Columbia fl ies.

Extract Even when suffrage was gradually extended to fi nally include virtually all white men during the s and s, the neoclassical poem remained the dominant way to celebrate, and usually also heroize, presidents and presidential candidates. The reasons for this need to be. Hail godlike Hero [i. Ne er shall the deathless laurel fade, But that brow eternal wave, And consecrate blest Vernon s shade.

Thy spreading glories still increase, Till earth, and time, and nature cease. Only a handful of the poems and songs on Harrison that I am familiar with are written in this fashion, among them To Gen. Harrison, which was originally published in , when Harrison was one of several Whig candidates for the pres idency, and then republished four years later. This poem still displays all the characteristics identifi ed above.

It begins as follows: As proudly as of yore, When o er thy country s banner, Portentous clouds did lour: When the life-blood of her gallant sons Stained many a fl owery plain, And the stars and stripes were waving o er Old ocean s stormy main! Moreover, they were usually sung to familiar melodies and were thus probably easy to memorize Goebel ; Gunderson The Harrison Song, for example, was sung to the tune of Yankee Doodle: Yankee Doodle fi ll a mug, A pewter mug of cider; When he commands our gallant ship, No evil can betide her.

When Washington sent Wayne out west The war to put an end on t, He took young William by the hand, And made him fi rst Leftenant [sic]. Songsters had been made possible, that is, affordable, by advances in print technology such as the invention of the rotary steam press in Watson 27 , and the Whigs were the fi rst to use them to collect political songs Collins At the same time, the existence of these songsters testifi es to the enormous appeal of the Whig campaign, at whose center stood the fi gure of Harrison.

His heroization followed established patterns the song just quoted links young William by way of alliteration to Washington, just as the traditional ode quoted earlier associates Jackson with the fi rst president but it also transformed them. Before I turn to this popularization on the level of content, though, it is necessary to quickly sketch the image of military heroism that Harrison already brought to the campaign and to discuss the various links that songs constructed between him and Andrew Jackson and George Washington. First, he agreed with all major positions that the Whigs assumed in this campaign: Voters could deduce from his [Harrison s] history and public comments that he believed in economic development, federal road projects, and public schools, and that although he would never celebrate slavery he would never do anything to restrict it either Collins Second, Harrison possibly could be made to fi t the hero-candidate concept popularized by Andrew Jackson Peterson 17 , who was the fi rst presidential candidate since Washington to have had a signifi cant military career prior to his political one and who could thus be cast as a legitimate holder of the offi ce that was still powerfully associated with Washington.

In fact, military heroism had been an integral part of Harrison s public persona sinc e the s. On November 7, , troops led by Harrison remained victorious in what became quickly known as the Battle of Tippecanoe against a trib e of Native Americans living in what was then the Indiana Territory.

The tribe was rumored to be in league with the British, who, in violation of the Treaty of Paris, still had troops in this area. The victory was, by any defi nition, not at all heroic, as Harrison, who did not think that the Indians would attack his camp during the night, was caught by surprise when they did so. Only when the sun went up did his troops manage to win the upper hand against an opponent vastly inferior in terms of numbers and equipment.

After they had repelled the attack, the Americans destroyed the tribe s village. As so often, however, facts mattered little, and the label Tippecanoe quickly came to represent not a minor fi ght but all the Indian wars and the War of combined Collins Harrison s fame spread rap idly throughout the country and was con fi rmed when he defeated an actual alliance of Brit ish and Native American troops led by Colonel Proctor and Chief Tecumseh in the Battle of the Thames in ibid.

As a consequence, by the late s William Henry Harrison was a military hero second only to Andrew Jackson in the nation s heart ibid. Unsurprisingly, the Whigs tried to capitalize on this image during the campaign. His military achievements were invariably mentioned by all campaign speakers Gunderson and usually held up against the alleged cowardice of Van Buren, who, as the satirical Little Vanny put it, never was seen in battle l.

In turn, Democratic campaigners sought to undermine Harrison s heroism by offering alternative but hardly more truthful accounts of the battles of Tippecanoe and the Thames Gunderson , but the notion of Harrison s military heroism was so fi rmly rooted in the public mind that they had no chance to shake it. The nickname Old Tippecanoe was quickly established for Harrison early in the campaign and functioned until its end as a constant reminder of his military exploits without spelling them out. Probably because the Whigs could take Harrison s military heroism for granted, his deeds are addressed explicitly in only a few campaign songs.

Frequently, though, they are implicitly evoked by references to him as Old Tippecanoe. The actual battle is never described, but by the end of the third stanza Harrison has become the Hero of Tippecanoe l.

One of the few songs that provides a narrative of his time as a soldier and thus actively heroizes Harrison in this regard is Bold Tippecanoe from the Tippecanoe Song Book. This song describes all major battles in which Harrison participated in great detail. The stanza about Tippecanoe, then, makes the purpose of this heroization impossible to miss, as it projects Harrison as Commanderin-Chief!

This song, though, does not offer a narrative of events but focuses on Harrison s heroic persona, and, highlighting atmosphere and character, casts him as the protector of women and children, who, among other heroic deeds, restores, gaily smiling, her babe to [a mother s] arm l. Even the songs that revel in Harrison s military heroism of the past, then, do so to underline his claim to the presidency in the present. A New and Better Jackson Slightly more frequently than explicitly highlighting Harrison s military deeds, the campaign songs forge a connection between Harrison and former president Andrew Jackson, as whose vice president Harrison s opponent, Martin Van Buren, had served before he was elected president.

It is highly probable that songs that created such a link were employed specifi cally in those parts of the country where voters were skeptical about Van Buren but still admired Jackson. A ware that many small farmers, middle-class planters, workers, and Westerners in general would likely vote for the Democrats because of a strong personal devotion to General Jackson Gunderson 9 , the Whigs attempted to fashion Harrison as the true successor of Jackson for this part of the electorate.

In fact, [Harrison s] similarity to the Jackson of and made him particularly appealing to Westerners and Antimasons and thus had been a major factor in his choice as a candidate in the fi rst place Holt, Rise Once he had been selected, the Whigs tried to nickname him Old Buckeye in order associate him in the minds of voters with Jackson, who was generally known as Old Hickory Collins Since this attempt failed and the name did not stick, songs and poems took over the function of linking the two. Quoting 2 Corinthians 6: In similar, but more secular fashion, Our Own Cincinnatus appeals to noble Conservatives, in this case a clear reference to the Democrats l.

The Song of the Old Jackson Men even assumes the perspective of a group of Jackson supporters who are highly critical of Democrats who question Harrison s military her oism and slander him because of his allegedly humble lifestyle: Unsurprisingly, the song goes on to celebrate his poverty, to confi rm his heroism, and to contrast his and Jackson s military service with Van Buren s behaviour.

Reminding singers and listeners that Van Buren did not fi ght in the War of , the song aligns Jackson and Harrison when it says about the incumbent: Campaign poems, too, tried to win the votes of Jackson supporters. Harrison must be the true heir to Jackson, the poem thus suggests, because he is acknowledged as such by many Jackson supporters. The poem The Difference, fi nally, which compares the little king Van Buren l. It is important, however, not to overemphasize the tendency to construct explicit connections between Harrison and Jackson.

Only a handful of the more than hundred songs and poems written about Harrison for the campaign actively forg e this link. The overwhelming majority does not mention Jackson at all and focuses on Harrison only or compares him to Van Buren. The strategy behind this is obvious. The Whigs were, after all, campaigning for votes not only from those who had voted for Jackson in two elections but also from those who had always objected to him.

Thus, to generally fashion Harrison as Jackson s true heir would have been counterproductive. It made far more sense to heroize Harrison in a fashion that allowed supporters of Jackson to see him as a copy of their idol and opponents to see him as somebody who had much in common with Jackson but lacked his alleged dictatorial tendencies Peterson In this regard, linking Harrison to George Washington was crucial because Washington was admired by everyone.

To supporters of Jackson it signaled that, like the Tennessean before him, Harrison would uphold the republican principles associated with Washington, 3 and to Jackson s The fi rst president had been the young nation s towering hero since its inception, he had defi ned what Americans expected of a president, and as party competition increased during the fi rst half of the nineteenth century, he became, as Vivien Green Fryd has put it, a central symbol of unity Fryd Consequently, His successors tried to cast themselves in the same image and invariably were cast by their supporters in this fashion Watson 7.

The Whigs did this through a variety of rituals, for example by drinking fi rst to the people, then to Washington, and then to Harrison when the time for the formal toasts which were an important part of Whig gatherings during the campaign had come Gunderson , thereby implicitly aligning the two and casting their candidate as Washington s successor.

The Democrats undoubtedly did the same for Van Buren, but for a variety of reasons, Harrison could be particularly successfully projected by the Whigs as the next Washington, as both The Hero of Tippecanoe l. To begin with, there were parallels in their military careers. Both Washington and Harrison had been involved in battles against both the Indians and the British.

Washington had fought fi rst the Indians during the French and Indian War and then the British during the War of Independence, while Harrison encountered a combined force of both in the Battle of the Thames. Indeed, the War of , of which the battles at the Thames and Tippecanoe were part, was widely regarded as a repetition of the fi rst confl ict with Great Britain, as a Second War of Independence Collins 49 , and hence the Hero of Tippecanoe could be made to appear as a veritable copy of the fi rst president, as a second Washington.

What is more, the Whigs highlighted a direct link between Washington and Harrison: When William Henry expressed a willingness to join the military, President George Washington himself signed off on the commission because he knew and respected Harrison s father Collins Var ious songs emphasize this connection to legitimize Harrison s claim to the presidency.

Our Own Cincinnatus, for example, merges the beginnings of Harrison s time in the army with his most famous victory, thus suggesting that Washington enabled Harrison to become a hero: The effort to represent Harrison as somebody who is exactly like the heroes of the War of Independence comes to the fore here particularly pointedly. A third parallel that Whig songs and poems repeatedly stress is that Harrison was, like Washington, born in Virginia. This is remarkable insofar as, apart from that, the campaign consistently presented him as a Westerner.

That it acknowledges his real origins in order to link him to the fi rst president shows how crucial this association was for success. The argument that songs that emphasize Harrison s Virginian heritage make in different degrees of explicitness is that the spatial proximity of their birthplaces proves that their characters and values are identical. This idea is most obvious in the rather traditional poem The Hero of Tippecanoe, which also credits Harrison s father with instilling the right values in him: He was born very near to the same spot of earth That gave the illustrious Washington birth; His father is one of the patriots dead Who declared Independence at risque [sic] of his head, And early held up to his son s imitation The Sage of Mount Vernon, the pride of the nation, And formed the man for a patriot true, A statesman and hero of Tippecanoe.

In similar fashion, the song The Voice of Virginia describes Harrison as worthy of our country s sire l. By contrast, the Gathering Song. The claim that Van Buren had British allies was of course wrong, but it was effective as it cast the upcoming election as a repetition of the War of Independence and thus underlined the idea that Harrison was a sec ond Washington.

Arguably most important in this regard, however, was that Harrison was like Washington presented as a Cincinnatus. Cincinnatus and Cider Since the newly founded United States self-consciously modelled itself after the Roman Republic and its values, the fi gure of Cincinnatus the Roman statesman who left his plough when called to help his countrymen and resigned immediately after the invasion had been defeated served as a template for many of the American republic s heroes from the start.

As Garry Wills has demonstrated in great detail, George Washington was widely hailed as the American Cincinnatus because he did not strive for power but stepped down voluntarily both as commander of the Continental Army and later as president and returned to private life in Mount Vernon twice. Since Harrison had also resigned his commission and returned to his farm near North Bend, Ohio, after the War of and had only left it since then to serve as a member of Congress and fi rst governor of Indiana for a couple of years, his story lent itself to being heroized according to the Cincinnatus model.

Hence, during the campaign countless speakers cast him in this role Watson , and he fashioned himself accordingly. In effect, he assumed this pose as early as , when he repeatedly declared during a speaking tour that he was not [ ] responsible for being in the position of a Cincinnatus who might be called to leave the plow for the presidency Goebel Even two years later when he broke with tradition and campaigned himself, Harrison man aged to uphold this pose to a certain degree by pledging himself to a single term and talking about the necessity to curb executive power ibid.

He thus violated the republican principle of self-restraint that Cincinnatus stood for, but did so in order to promote other republican values also associated with the Roman. In fact, he maintained the Cincinnatus posture even during his inaugural address, which began with the words Called from a retirement qtd.

Harrison, then, presented himself as a classical Cincinnatus, but this is not how he was predominantly projected throughout the campaign, especially not in songs and poems. There is only one poem I am aware of, Old Tippecanoe, which uses a traditional form, a variety of references to antiquity, and conventionalized images such as the laurel to cast Harrison as a Cincinnatus in the classical fashion: For when the foes of his country no longer could harm her, To the shades of retirement he quickly withdrew; And now at North Bend see the honest old farmer, Who won the green laurel at Tippecanoe.

Depicting him not as a gentleman farmer but as a poor yeoman who lives in a simple log cabin and drinks not wine but hard cider, they represent him in a fashion familiar from renderings of Washington-as-Cincinnatus at that time. As Karsten Fitz has shown, the yeoman farmer became a republican symbol during the antebellum period for the simple reason that, since more than two-thirds of Americans worked in agriculture in , the idea of the democratic yeoman farmer was based upon reality Fitz, Personifi cation This development also affected representations of Washington, who was, particularly in drawings and illustrations, increasingly depicted as a farmer Fitz, American.

Whereas the Early Republic imagined him as a Cincinnatus who returned to private life in Mount Vernon, he was now envisioned as performing manual labor there himself. Since the most central symbol for [the] agrarian philosophy [of republicanism] was the plough, various images from this period show Washington using one Fitz, Personifi cation Such depictions of course completely ignored that Washington Historical accuracy, however, did not matter; what mattered was that such images performed an approximation of Washington to the common man ibid.

Fitz s examples are mostly taken from the s and s. It is therefore quite possible that the transformation of Washington s image as Cincinnatus that he observes was at least partly fuelled by the way in which Harrison was represented during the campaign of As with Washington, the contradictions between image and reality were ignored and Harrison s rather luxurious mansion on his acre farm near the village of North Bend, fourteen miles from Cincinnati, was turned in visual and verbal representations into a humble log cabin.

It is unclear, though, if Whig strategists intended to project Harrison as poor from the beginning or if they only recognized the opportunity after a Democratic newspaper slighted Harrison after his nomination and involuntarily provided the Whigs with the major symbols of the campaign: Give him a barrel of hard cider, and settle a pension of two thousand a year on him, the newspaper quoted a disaffected supporter of Henry Clay, who had hoped to win the Whig nomination for himself, and my word for it, he will sit the remainder of his days in his log cabin qtd.

In any case, the Whigs quickly recognized the opportunity this sneer offered. Not only did the image of the simple log cabin candidate allow them to represent Harrison as a disinterested republican, a veritable Cincinnatus, who was without personal ambition but would heed the people s call; moreover, as hard cider was a simple beverage that carried associations of pov erty and domesticity Watson , they could pres ent Harrison as a common man and thus appeal to poorer voters exactly the parts of the electorate, that is, that the Whigs had so far never won over.

As Gunderson puts it, In dram atizing their devotion to log cabins and hard cider, Whig strategists gave belated acquiescence to the principle that political success was dependent upon support of the masses, many of whom were newly enfranchised Gunderson As a consequence, Stories of his poverty and his love of farm work were widely circulated Goebel And as songs were a good way to reac h these masses, countless Whig campaign songs spread the image of Harrison as a Cincinnatus who was poor, ploughed his own fi elds, and drank nothing but hard cider.

Some of these songs still feature the name Cincinnatus, which indicates that it carried meaning even for the lower classes, to which these songs were geared. Indeed, the possessive pronoun in the title Our Own Cincinnatus, sung to the popular melody of Rosin the Bow, shows the appropriation of the model by exactly this group. The Cincinnatus narrative, though, is not taken up at all in the song and not explicitly applied to Harrison, who is celebrated, however, for always serving his country when needed. Constructing a strict binary between the rich elite and the rest of the people, the song, like countless others, claims that Harrison is the candidate of the people because he is one of them: The same point is made in the song The Hero of Tippecanoe: But, did not this Harrison so rule the West, As, like men now in offi ce to feather his nest?

No, no; though he might, like some in high stations, By taking advantage in land speculations,. He is the people s candidate, Because he is a farmer, Should he ascend the chair of State, He ll buckle on his armor, And like a valiant patriot He will commence his work, sir, And with kind words defend his cause Without the help of dirks, sir.

O log cabins log cabins and hard cider, O log cabins old Tip will tap the cider. The line He ll buckle on his armor has Harrison prepare for the execution of the offi ce of president in the same fashion in which the Roman Cincinnatus must have prepared to fi ght the invasion that threatened his republic. The same tenet is at the center of the argument made in the sixth stanza of Gathering Song, which simultaneously forges a connection between Washington and Harrison: In fact, this idea that Harrison is the right candidate and will do the right things as president because he is a simple farmer and will return to the farm after he has done his duty can be considered the smallest common denominator in the heroization of Harrison.

It is the part of the Cincinnatus model that is invariably retained even if all others are stripped away because it allowed the Whigs to present Harrison as the exact counterpart of much-disliked incumbent Martin van Buren. Corrupt King The Whigs success in the election of hinge d on the heroic persona they managed to construct for William Henry Harrison.

As I have demonstrated, Harrison was not only hailed as a military hero, but also as a Cincinnatus, as a farmer who would not cling to power but only use his position for the benefi t of the people. Most importantly, though, he was projected as somebody whose heroic deeds were an integral, albeit exceptional, part of a life most voters were familiar with.

He was successfully cast as The People s Presidential Candidate, as one campaign broadsheet s headline proclaimed People s. He was not only hailed as a Hero Farmer, as the chorus of Our Hero Farmer repeatedly does, but also a brother farmer, as in Harrison l. This heroization resonated with the electorate and lent credibility to the Whigs claim that their administration would successfully tackle the effects of the economic depressions of and Holt, Rise The Whigs often wore badges and carried banners that declared Harrison to be the Poor Man s Friend or promised roast beef for everyone once Harrison was pres ident Gunderson , , They also sought to fi rmly anchor this notion in the minds of the people by widely circulating stories of how he welcomed visitors, often veterans or men of the church, to his farm in North Bend, treated them kindly, and shared what little he had with them to remedy their more pressing poverty Collins Such anecdotes, which functioned as symbolic promises of how he would take care of all of the nation s poor once he was president, were also taken up in songs.

This strategy was effective for two reasons. First, the heroization of Harrison was combined with constant reminders that the Democrats deci sion not to interfere with the economy, and especially their anti-banking stance, would prostrate the state s banking and credit system and thus destroy[] the credit poor men needed so badly Holt, Rise Second, the Whigs further disqualifi ed this political position by depicting President Martin Van Buren as corrupt, effeminate, and unrepublican, as a tyrant who did not care about the suffering of the people.

Its title already casts Van Buren as a king and thus as the ultimate nemesis of republicanism. The speech revelled in a minute, albeit completely imaginar y, description of the riches that Van Buren had allegedly amassed in the White House, fi nally adding insult to injury by claiming that in the garden there had been hills constructed, every pair of which was designed to resemble an amazon s bosom, with a miniature knoll or hillock on its apex, to denote the n pple qtd.

Articulating a tenet of republican ideology, that political and moral corruption are inextricably linked Butter , Ogle s speech represents Van Buren as the very opposite of what Harrison was said to stand for: Countless songs and several poems contributed to the construction of this dichotomy, either by focusing on Van Buren alone or by contrasting his defi ciencies with Harrison s virtues. Like King Belshazzar he dines in royal state with golden fork and spoon l.

Other texts have a slightly different emphasis and cast Van Buren as entirely effeminate.

In this song, the contrast to Harrison is only implied, but it is made explicit in many others, for example in The Hero of Tippecanoe which is not to be confused with the poem of the same title that I quoted earlier , which constructs binaries between East and West, luxury and hardship, and self-indulgence and public service. While Martin, well salaried, peacefully shone, Embosomed in charming repose, And with white cambric handkerchief wet with cologne, Delighted his delicate nose In the far west, on the red battle-ground, Where the savage war-whoop and the canon resound, Oh!

At the battle of Tippecanoe! It reiterates almost all accusations fi rst made by Ogle, accusing royal Van l. Using the same imagery, the poem Soliloquy of Mr. Van Buren, in which he laments his inevitable defeat, has Van Buren refer to his throne l. The monarchical associations thus evoked contrast markedly with the republican connotations of Harrison and Victory s appeal to place the hero of Tippecanoe in the great Washington s chair l.

That both the popular song and the sonnet use the same imagery and link Harrison to Washington shows once again that his heroic persona appealed to all parts of the electorate because it promised a return to the republican principles associated with Washington. The Whigs, then, were successful in the campaign of because they fi nally managed to appeal to all kinds of voters. While they were, as in previous elections, particularly successful among the economic and social elite, they did well enough among artisans in the East and farm ers in the West to secure a vast majority in the Electoral College Holt, Rise ; Watson The party managed to present itself as capable of, on the one hand, leading the country out of the economic crisis and narrowing the growing gap between rich and poor and, on the other, bringing about a moral regeneration and a return to the republican values allegedly betrayed by the monarchical Van Buren and his aristocratic Democrats.

The heroization of William Henry Harrison was crucial for communicating this agenda, as the specifi c heroic persona that the campaign constructed for him embodied the Whigs values and goals in prototypical fashion. Harrison, as I have shown, was heroized as a Cincinnatus, albeit in popularized form not as a gentleman planter, as George Washington was during the Early Republic, but as a poor Western farmer. Moreover, his heroization hinged not so much on poems, as with earlier presidents, but on songs.

The popularization of the heroic model went hand in hand with the deployment of a popular form. He is currently writin g a book about the heroization of American presidents between and Watson makes exactly the same point. According to him, the Whigs campaigned for a commercialized economy and the spread of evangelical virtues such as frugality or domesticity Watson My observations are based on a corpus of roughly 3, poems and songs on American presidents and presidential candidates published between and The song Ye Who Fought with Washington makes this genealogy explicit: Works Cited Bold Tippecanoe.

Marshall, Williams, and Butler, Plots, Designs, and Schemes: American Conspiracy Theories from the Puritans to the Present. William Henry Harrison and His Time. Scribner s Sons, Collins, Gail. Holt, Der alte Tippecanoe. Political and Sentimental Repository 9 June The American Revolution Remembered, s to s: Competing Images and Confl icting Narratives. Winter, The Personifi cation of the Minuteman: The Production of Representative Lives. Yale UP, Gathering Song. A Collection of Popular and Patriotic Songs: Respectfully Dedicated to the Friends of Harrison and Tyler.

The Madisonian 6 October The Log Cabin Minstrel: Patriot and Democrat Offi ce, A Reappraisal of Jacksonian Voting Behavior. A Master s Due: Essays in Honor of David Herbert Donald. Louisiana State UP, Oxford UP, Little Vanny. Haverhill Gazette 29 August New Year s Address. Connecticut Courant 9 January New- Hampshire Patriot 11 August Oh, Say, Who Is He? Old Tippecanoe Poems of American History. Houghton Miffl in, One Poor Soldier More. Easton Gazette 18 April Song of the Old Jackson Men. New-Bedford Mercury 18 September Haverhill Gazette 28 March The Last Loco Foco s Lament.

Easton Gazette 19 September The People s Presidential Candidate! Dorr, Howland, and Co. New-Bedford Mercury 23 October The Voice of Virginia. Weeks, Jordan and Company, Tippecanoe A Sucker Song. New Hampshire Sentinel 7 April See How They Ran: The Changing Role of the Presidential Candidate. The Politics of Jacksonian America.

Hill and Wang, Whig Song. New Hampshire Sentinel 8 January George Washington and the Enlightenment. Haverhill Gazette 12 September Ye Whigs of Columbia.

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