Journal Article

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

FLOYD, JANET

2013

Overview

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.

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press,Cambridge UNIVERSITY PRESS
• Subject: American culture / American history / American literature / Assault / Audiences / California / Cultural Conflict / Cultural studies / Culture / Literary language / Literature / Masculinity / Population / San Francisco, California / Social theory / Twain, Mark (Samuel Langhorne Clemens) (1835-1910) / U.S.A / Urban Areas / Writers / Writing