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Book Reviews
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Competing Voices: Literary Texts and the Battle for Meaning in Gilded Age Culture
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| RAILTON, BEN. Contesting the Past, Reconstructing the Nation: American Literature and Culture in the Gilded Age, 1876–1893. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2007. xii + 312 pp. $45.00 (cloth), ISBN 0-8173-1580-2.
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Ben Railton's insightful and finely researched work of literary analysis conjures an image of a cocktail party. There, somewhere near the crudités stands a man, cigar and Scotch in one hand, the other hand swooping and gesticulating for effect. The sad and miserable clutch of lesser mortals surrounding him, trapped, has given up getting a word in edgewise. He speaks with great authority on any topic and to those who might offer some contrary view, he tips his glass, offers a wink, and continues talking as if our would-be interlocutor's challenge merely added support to his own views. |
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I imagine our cocktail-party bloviator to be the personification of Railton's Gilded Age culture: a domineering and somewhat overbearing voice that crowds out other views, tempting onlookers to see consensus where none exists. In Contesting the Past, Reconstructing the Nation, Railton argues that Gilded Age culture witnessed the emergence of a "monologic national historical narrative, a unifying triumphalist vision of the past and its progressive relationship to the nation's present prosperity and future glory" (ix). This loud and boisterous monologue emphasized progress. To do so, however, it talked over others whose views of the American experience raised challenges to that consensus. Thus, in the language Railton uses throughout his book, the monologic of progress ultimately trumped the dialogic of conflict. |
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