<i>The Most American Thing in America: Circuit Chatauqua as Performance</i> (review)

lives. For these very reasons, Augst ought to have considered more carefully feminine sentimentalism in both its literary forms and women’s private practices. Nineteenth-century African-American writers, such as Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs, as well as Native American writers, like John Rollin Ridge and Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins, also understood the appeal of sentimentalism and adapted it to their own political, social, and literary purposes. Although Augst cannot be expected to take into account all aspects of nineteenth-century sentimentalism, his own comparative approach to popular and material cultures in relation to traditional literature requires some consideration of literacy across gender, class, and ethnic boundaries. For all its virtues, the present study remains too narrowly focused on white, middle-class, masculine practices, most of which were constructed ideologically to exclude other social formations. The academic study of literature in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century U.S. culture undoubtedly depends significantly on bourgeois masculine values, but the feminine and minority sentimental and other literary forms excluded from the academic curriculum until quite recently were vigorously, in some cases violently, repressed. What do these exclusions teach us about the emergence of “American literature” out of middle-class literacy and its “moral economy” in the period? Augst’s book does not help us answer this question, but it provokes us to ask it. University of Southern California John Carlos Rowe