The Dangerous Potential of Reading Readers & the Negotiation of Power in Selected Nineteenth-Century Narratives Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory Series

The development of a mass readership, a mass market for books, and a prominent status of reading and readers is reflected in the central role of literacy, reading, and books in the lives of protagonists in nineteenth-century American and French literature. In this book, Ana-Isabel Aliaga-Buchenau examines the destabilizing role of reading in the works of Frederick Douglass, Horatio Alger, Emile Zola, Louisa May Alcott, and Gustave Flaubert. This book-the first to study nineteenth-century protagonists across lines of nationality, class, and gender-demonstrates the empowering effects of reading for Douglass, Alger's Ragged Dick, Zola's Etienne, Alcott's Jo, and Flaubert's Emma.

Contents Acknowledgments Introduction 1. Reading and Power in the Nineteenth Century 2. The Pathway from Slavery to Freedom: Frederick Douglass's Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass 3. The Passage to Middle-Class Respectability: Horatio Alger's Ragged Dick 4. The Road to Revolt: Emile Zola's Germinal 5. Women, Reading, and Power 6. The Demonic Underneath the Angelic Little Woman: Louisa May Alcott's Little Women 7. A Little Woman Gone Astray: Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index

Ana-Isabel Aliaga-Buchenau received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Currently Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, she is working on a comparative study of ficitional representations of German immigration to Mexico and the United States.

Updating existing treatments of the sublime in the eighteenth century, this book addresses the nature of the sublime experience itself and the functions that experience has played, and continues to play, within aesthetic discourse.