Sensational Designs

What makes a literary classic? In Sensational Designs Jane Tompkins argues that it is not the intrinsic merit of a text but rather the circumstances of its writing. Against the modernist belief that art in order to be art must be free from propaganda Tompkins contends that writers like Brockden Brown Cooper Stowe and Warner wrote in order to alter the face of the social world not to elicit aesthetic appreciation.Thus the value and significance of the novels for readers of their time depended on precisely those characteristics that formalist criticism has taught us to deplore: stereotyped characters sensational plots and cliched language.