| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 106.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 106.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Isabelle Lehuu. Carnival on the Page: Popular Print Media in Antebellum America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 2000. Pp. xi, 244. Cloth $39.95, paper $17.95.

In this informed, thoughtful study of American antebellum print culture, Isabelle Lehuu considers some of the popular materials circulated between 1832 and the Panic of 1857. She is interested in the outpouring of uncopyrighted, non-book artifacts, which she interprets as signifying a transient, unique era of festive abundance. Combining Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of carnival as a licensed disruption of established norms with Victor Turner's theory of liminality, and applying this amalgam to the history of the book, Lehuu sees antebellum print culture as a carnivalesque disruption of the disciplinary, authoritarian culture of book learning. 1

She proposes that the proliferation of such ephemera as penny newspapers, mammoth-sized weeklies, gift book annuals, and ladies' magazines aimed to please rather than instruct a white population that was both newly literate and newly urban. Technological efficiencies of paper making, printing, and distributing allowed for large-scale production of inexpensive print objects but dictated neither the content of such objects nor the uses they would serve. Rather than being transformed by print into prudent, self-governing citizens—as republican ideology assumed would be the case—antebellum readers transformed print itself into a raucously transgressive cultural arena. . . .

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