Carnival on the Page: Popular Print Media in Antebellum America

Carnival on the Page: Popular Print Media in Antebellum America. By Isabelle Lehuu. (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2000. Pp. xi, 244. Illustrations. Cloth, $39.95; paper, $17.95.) Isabelle Lehuu invites her readers to an antebellum carnival fueled by paper and ink. The elements that make up the show-beautifully bound giftbooks, saucy penny newspapers, lavishly illustrated ladies' magazines, and outlandish mammoth newspapers-are familiar to historians, librarians, and collectors who have spent time around antebellum publications. Nevertheless, Lehuu aims to capture this audience and a wider one with an ambitious agenda that promises both to demonstrate the interconnections of this seemingly disparate heap of oddities and to establish these publications as important operatives in the creation of antebellum culture. Unfortunately, despite the best efforts of the author, readers may emerge disappointed from their visits to Lehuu's carnival. Interesting insights abound, but ultimately the text does not sustain many of its bold interpretations. In Carnival on the Page, Lehuu seeks to make up for the failure of previous scholars to understand the transformative nature of what rolled off antebellum presses. She asserts that certain types of publications produced between 1830 and 1860 changed the cultural landscape in significant ways by challenging the traditional definition of the book, creating multiple reading publics, changing reading practices, aiding in the creation of a separate sphere of print culture for women, and contributing to the bifurcation of culture into high and low divisions at a time far earlier than previously believed. To understand how all of these important cultural developments could emerge in the wake of a series of publications often described as cheap, light, and grotesque, Lehuu constructs a theoretical framework that combines the familiar ideas of liminality found in the work of anthropologist Victor Turner with studies of the transgressional nature of the carnival undertaken by the literary scholar Mikhail Bakhtin. From this blending emerges the conclusion that ephemeral antebellum publications were powerful engines of cultural change because they came into existence at a time when society, experiencing a temporary loosening of the normative, was prepared to encounter what previously would have been rejected as eccentric or inappropriate. After laying out her major objectives and theoretical underpinnings, the author presents a chapter concerned with establishing that an "elusive reading revolution" took place in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, resulting in the fracturing of the formerly unitary print community into smaller segments (Chap. 1). This development, she suggests, accelerated the cultural process of drawing distinctions based on class and gender. The following chapters are devoted to the physical characteristics, content, and audience of penny papers, mammoth newspapers, giftbooks, and ladies' magazines. Lehuu designates these entities as agents provocateur responsible for shattering the cultural status quo. The last chapter treats what the author describes as a "widespread condemnation" of the creation and consumptions of "transgressive forms of print" (155). The strength of the book lies in the convincing case made by Lehuu that antebellum print culture needs to be studied carefully in its own right rather than as a prelude to the events of the second half of the nineteenth century. She demonstrates that the products of the antebellum printing press clearly had a substantial impact on American culture. …