The Killers: A Narrative of Real Life in Philadelphia - Softcover

Lippard, George

 
9780812223743: The Killers: A Narrative of Real Life in Philadelphia
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0812223748 ISBN 13: 9780812223743
Verlag: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016

Inhaltsangabe

PHILADELPHIA, the 1840s: a corrupt banker disowns his dissolute son, who then reappears as a hardened smuggler in the contraband slave trade. Another son, hidden from his father since birth and condemned as a former felon, falls in with a ferocious street gang led by his elder brother and his revenge-hungry comrade from Cuba. His adopted sister, a beautiful actress, is kidnapped, and her remorseful black captor becomes her savior as his tavern is engulfed in flames. Vendetta, gang violence, racial tensions, and international intrigue collide in an explosive novella based on the events leading up to an infamous 1849 Philadelphia race riot. The Killers takes the reader on a fast-paced journey from the hallowed halls of academia at Yale College to the dismal solitary cells of Eastern State Penitentiary and through southwest Philadelphia's community of free African Americans. Though the book's violence was ignited by the particulars of Philadelphia life and politics, the flames were fanned by nationwide anxieties about race, labor, immigration, and sexuality that emerged in the young republic.

Penned by fiery novelist, labor activist, and reformer George Lippard (1822-1854) and first serialized in 1849, The Killers was the work of a wildly popular writer who outsold Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne in his lifetime. Long out of print, the novella now appears in an edition supplemented with a brief biography of the author, an untangling of the book's complex textual history, and excerpts from related contemporaneous publications. Editors Matt Cohen and Edlie L. Wong set the scene of an antebellum Philadelphia rife with racial and class divisions, implicated in the international slave trade, and immersed in Cuban annexation schemes to frame this compact and compelling tale.

Serving up in a short form the same heady mix of sensational narrative, local color, and impassioned politics found in Lippard's sprawling The Quaker City, or The Monks of Monks Hall, The Killers is here brought back to lurid life.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Matt Cohen is Associate Professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin and author of The Networked Wilderness: Communicating in Early New England. Edlie L. Wong is Associate Professor of English at the University of Maryland, College Park, and author of Neither Fugitive nor Free: Atlantic Slavery, Freedom Suits, and the Legal Culture of Travel.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Introduction

Equal parts crime novella and city mystery, The Killers: A Narrative of Real Life in Philadelphia showcases the wide-ranging political interests and formal innovations of its author, Philadelphia writer, labor activist, and reformer George Lippard. Over the course of a short but prolific career, Lippard (1822-54) published his own weekly paper, the Quaker City, and authored more than twenty novels, including his most famous, the wildly popular The Quaker City; or, The Monks of Monk Hall (1844-45), a lurid exposé of Philadelphia political corruption. "The critics never can accuse him of laziness—that is certain," remarked his earliest biographer in 1855. The Quaker City was the best-selling U.S. novel before Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, and it helped make Lippard a major literary figure. Little known today, in the 1840s, Lippard was read more widely than either Edgar Allan Poe (who happened to be a close acquaintance) or Nathaniel Hawthorne. The Killers offers a compact portrait of Lippard's narrative obsessions, his formal innovations, and his political commitments. It is spun around tales of gang violence, corrupt bankers, and inner-city racial tensions, and it resonates today no less for its foreshadowings of the Occupy Wall Street movement, transnational gang warfare, and black market economies than for its valuable insights into key topics in American literary and cultural studies. It refracts histories of American race relations, the politics of immigration and labor conflict, the United States as empire, transnational political and literary economies, and ephemeral popular literary forms like the city mystery and sensational pamphlet novel, directed toward a largely working-class readership.

Cheap popular print though it was in its day, only a few copies of The Killers are known to survive. After a brief description of Lippard's life and career, this introduction will offer cultural and historical background for reading The Killers, including a brief account of what is known about its publication history.

George Lippard

The fourth of six children, Lippard was born on a farm near Yellow Springs, Chester County, Pennsylvania, in 1822. When he was two years old, the family sold the farm and moved to Germantown in northwest Philadelphia. Lippard had a hard childhood. Frequently ill, his parents eventually became physically incapable of working, and relatives raised him and his siblings. He lived with a grandfather and two maiden aunts who, facing increasingly straitened circumstances, were forced to sell off the family property piecemeal. Lippard moved to Philadelphia proper after the death of his mother in 1831. As a teenager, Lippard was intended for training in the ministry, but dropped out of a Methodist seminary at age fifteen. His father died soon thereafter and left his son with no legacy. Lippard, quickly falling out of good relations with the aunts who had charge of him, found himself more or less homeless in the middle of one of the worst economic collapses in the United States' history, in the wake of the Panic of 1837. Lippard found employment as an assistant in law offices, but the position paid little, and he quickly became disillusioned.

In 1840, Lippard turned to fiction, beginning his first long romance, The Ladye Annabel; or, The Doom of the Poisoner, which he would complete two years later. He got his start in the literary marketplace with a penny newspaper in Philadelphia, the Spirit of the Times, where he worked as a copy editor and city news reporter. During this time, Lippard presumably met Poe, who worked across the street in the offices of Graham's Magazine and with whom he forged a literary friendship. Lippard began to make a name for himself with satirical columns; writing later for a paper called the Citizen Soldier, he wrote a literary-critical column called "The Spermaceti Papers" that furthered his fame. In 1847, as his popularity and success grew, Lippard married Rose Newman in an unconventional moonlit ceremony that took place overlooking the Wissahickon in Germantown. Family tragedy, however, continued to haunt Lippard, who later suffered the loss of his beloved wife and two children to tuberculosis. "Death has been busy with my home," mourns Lippard's prologue to New York: Its Upper Ten and Lower Million (1853), "death hath indeed laid my house desolate."

Between 1842 and 1852, the literary historian David Reynolds estimates, Lippard published an average of a million words yearly in the form of sensational fiction, historical romances, public lectures, and critical essays. "In a day when Thoreau's social criticism went virtually unnoticed," Reynolds writes, "Lippard's took the nation by storm, provoking constant controversy and causing unprecedented sales of his fiction." He hit his stride in 1844-45 with The Quaker City; or, The Monks of Monk Hall, which is thought to have sold sixty thousand copies within its first year in print. With the success of The Quaker City, Lippard became the leading figure of a new popular genre: the inexpensive serial sensation novel, which drew upon, while revolutionizing, the reporting of current events in U.S. cities. In the 1830s, the advent of modern printing technologies facilitated the establishment of penny press newspapers in all major U.S. cities, and sensational journalism, with its lurid accounts of crime, blackmail, and scandal, became a popular form of entertainment. Lippard had begun The Quaker City as a seduction narrative, yet as its didacticism evolved, he "determined to write a book which should describe all the phases of a corrupt social system, as manifested in the city of Philadelphia" (2). In fictions like The Quaker City and The Killers, Lippard built a socialist critique of urban society through sensational depictions of city life that, while they used gothic elements popularized by the likes of Poe, prioritized arguments on behalf of the working class over aesthetic concerns. And while a writer for the masses, Lippard also distinguished his writing from the amoral sensationalism of the penny press, to which his writings were often compared.

Lippard embraced an ardent democratic politics and protested the betrayal of the Founding Fathers' republican ideals in nightmarish visions of nineteenth-century America ruined by capitalist exploitation, religious hypocrisy, and class divisions. In city mysteries like The Killers, Lippard exposed all manner of social inequities through highly charged "flights of the subversive imagination, and freely drawing on the irrational and grotesque" after the style of his much-admired predecessor, the Philadelphia novelist Charles Brockden Brown, to whom he dedicated The Quaker City. At the same time, Lippard lashed out against the urban literary establishment, satirizing the vogue in feminized sentimental fiction while advocating a politicized national literature that aligned him with Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Herman Melville, and Walt Whitman. Lippard's works pervaded the antebellum literary scene; from Whitman's early short fiction such as "Death in the School-Room (a Fact)" (1844), to the powerful but flawed reformer Hollingsworth in Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance (1852), to Melville's depiction of city life in his novels Redburn: His First Voyage (1849) and Pierre; or, The Ambiguities (1852), the themes, stances, and stylistics of Lippard and his fellow city-mysteries storytellers can be found influencing U.S. writers across the canonical spectrum. Indeed, Lippard's vigorous attacks on literary sentimentalism and the hypocritical paternalism of middle-class reformism that he associated it with would find their counterpart in postbellum America in the...

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Verlag
University of Pennsylvania Press
Erscheinungsdatum
2016
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0812223748
ISBN 13 
9780812223743
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
256
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
preigu
mail@preigu.de

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Osnabrück
49078
Deutschland

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