Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 53-11, Section: A, page: 3959.

Director: Richard H. Brodhead.

Between 1800 and 1860 biography played a prominent role in every major transformation of American culture: the origins of party politics, the definition of the public sphere, the reformulation of gender, and the emergence of multiple national literary cultures. In these years biography also became the most popular literary form in the United States after the novel. After examining the social basis for the "Biographical Mania" through local library records and readers' diaries, this dissertation explores the place of biography in nineteenth-century culture and the changing constructions of the concept of "biography" itself.

In the view of early national and antebellum biographers, readers, and critics, biography provided models for emulation and inspiration: republican instruction for a post-Revolutionary generation, lessons for "self-made men" in liberal Jacksonian society. At the same time, biographers helped to shape central aspects of American culture: the relationships between past and present, public and private, the individual and society. Presidential campaign biographies implied that male identity developed in public, masculine "schools" that paralleled the feminized domestic sphere of sentimental fiction. Memoirs of Christian women promoted women's public activity as missionaries and teachers, while relocating biography in the private realms of home and heart. Authorial innovation was clearest at the boundaries between literary cultures. The most famous campaign life, Hawthorne's Life of Franklin Pierce (1852), marked the first significant intersection of Jacksonian politics and the commercial literary market. Elizabeth Ellet, the first historian of American women, sought to bridge two literary communities, each with its own rhetoric and argument: the worlds of scholarly historians and of women's magazines and domestic literature.

By mid-century critics began to question the purpose of biography, shifting the discussion away from moral or civic instruction and toward the literary and perceptive skills that successful biographers needed. This development emerged in part from Romantic ideas of individuality, but also in reaction against popular biographical practice, dominated by didacticism and commemoration. Redefining "pure" biography as the product of historical research and literary artistry, critics and biographers by 1900 obscured the cultural origins of the craft their predecessors had created and shaped before the Civil War.