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“Our Present Work Will Be All Doors”: Writers and Periodical Culture in 1860s San Francisco

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 January 2013

JANET FLOYD
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Abstract

This article examines the periodical culture of 1860s San Francisco, a challenging and brittle print culture environment for editors and writers. It focusses on the Golden Era and the collective life it produced, in its pages, for the city's unstable population. The Era celebrated a masculine culture of street and saloon, while making social and literary convention the focus of aggressive attack. Writers in this setting developed their assault on literary form in a range of material that dismantled popular modes of writing and pressed questions about writing and reading on its audiences. Their work constitutes a distinctive strain of western writing during this period, by turns critical of and indifferent to contemporary forms of representation of the cultures of the region. It also develops a mode of response to industrial urban experience during this period that makes an address to readers nationally and internationally as well as locally.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 47 , Issue 3 , August 2013 , pp. 659 - 672
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013 

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References

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