Mary Esteve provides a study of crowd representations in American
literature from the antebellum era to the early twentieth century. As
a central icon of political and cultural democracy, the crowd occupies
a prominent place in the American literary and cultural landscape.
Esteve examines a range of writing by Poe, Hawthorne, Lydia Maria
Child,Du Bois, James, and Stephen Crane among others. These writers,
she argues, distinguish between the aesthetics of immersion in a
crowd and the mode of collectivity demanded of political-liberal subjects.
In their representations of everyday crowds, ranging fromstreams
of urban pedestrians to swarms of train travellers, from upper-class
parties to lower-class revivalist meetings, such authors seize on the
political problems facing a mass liberal democracy – problems such as
the stipulations of citizenship, nation formation, mass immigration,
and the emergence of mass media. Esteve examines both the aesthetic
and political meanings of such urban crowd scenes.