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

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

• Studies in Classic American Literature (Classic, 20th-Century, Penguin)
• The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin (Dover Thrift Editions)
• The Feminization of American Culture
• Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America
• The Plight of Feeling: Sympathy and Dissent in the Early American Novel
• The Senses of Walden: An Expanded Edition
• The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America
• Uncle Tom's Cabin
• The Prairie (Leatherstocking Tale)
• The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (Yale Nota Bene S)