God in the Street: New York Writing from the Penny Press to Melville

"This is a fine book - gracefully written, fresh in its approach to antebellum literature, and persuasive in its readings of Melville within a rich sense of history and social context." - Barbara Melosh, George Mason University "As informative as it is informing, God in the Street draws us into the complexities of the New York encounter in which raw urban life of the 1840s and 1850s and America's growing literary aesthetic interact to form a distinctive genre, the 'New York discourse.' With the erudition and grace of a practiced scholar-critic, Bergmann recovers in rich detail the literary transformations of New York's mean streets into Penny Press sketches, verbal panoramas, cony-catching stunts, flaneuristic 'feuilletons,' guidebooks, poems, and novels; out of which eventually emerge the exuberance and doubt of Whitman and Melville. Full of provocative readings and careful contextualization, this is sure to be a lasting contribution to 19th century American studies." - John Bryant, Hofstra University