Cynthia Lee Patterson, Bartow, Florida, is assistant professor of English at University of South Florida Polytechnic. Her articles have appeared in American Periodicals, Journal of American History, and the Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography.
Cynthia Lee Patterson's comprehensive Art for the Middle Classes:
America's Illustrated Magazines of the 1840s studies the
'embellishments'--the hundreds of engravings and illustrations that
provided art to eager middle-class readers of the 'Philadelphia
Pictorials, ' the five monthly magazines that reigned supreme in
the US in the 1840s. Drawing on archival materials concerning the
relationships among editors, artists, and writers, the nature of
the reading audiences, new technologies of image reproduction, and
the economics of distribution patterns and practices, Patterson
argues that these periodical embellishments, virtually ignored in
histories of art, are artifacts of broad historical, literary, and
artistic significance. Lavishly illustrated and engagingly written,
Art for the Middle Classes is an essential contribution to the
fields of book history, periodicals, and American cultural
history.--Susan Belasco, professor of English at the University of
Nebraska-Lincoln and past president of the Research Society for
American Periodicals
Recent historians of antebellum America have produced many splendid
studies of the popular arts, printing technology, publishing
economics, magazine journalism, and middle-class consumer culture.
Art for the Middle Classes is distinctive and extraordinarily
useful because it integrates all of these strains of historical
research--and more. It is a wide-ranging, meticulously researched,
and wonderfully readable evocation of popular magazine art in 1840s
America.--David Paul Nord, professor of journalism and adjunct
professor of history at Indiana University-Bloomington and author
of Faith in Reading: Religious Publishing and the Birth of Mass
Media in America
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