Fictions of Mass Democracy in Nineteenth-Century America - Stacey (University of Utah) Margolis - Bog

This book examines how mass democracy was understood before public opinion could be measured by polls. It demonstrates how novels by Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Fanny Fern, Harriet Jacobs and James Fenimore Cooper attempt to understand a public organized by political discourse and informal social networks.