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America’s England examines the patterns of affiliation through which U.S. writers, public intellectuals, politicians, and aesthetes encoded the political turmoil of antebellum America in a transatlantic constellation. Demonstrating that English genealogies, geographies, and economics encoded the sectional crisis for antebellum Americans on both sides of the Mason-Dixon, it locates many of the crisis points of 1830s, 40s, 50s, and 60s America in a broader cisatlantic struggle over transatlantic connection. Through engagement with contemporaneous renditions of English race, history, landscape aesthetics, transatlantic telecommunications, and free trade discourses, northern and southern partisans—abolitionists, Unionists, and slaveholders alike—re-imagined the terms of the conflict, forming a transatlantic surround for the otherwise irreducibly cisatlantic political struggles that would dissolve the Union in 1861. This re-conceptualization of sectional issues in transatlantic terms undermined the notion that white citizens of the United States formed a unified biological or cultural community, effectively polarizing the imagined ethnic and cultural bases of the American polity. Moreover, a continued reference to English historical, cultural, and political formations allowed public intellectuals and authors such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Frederick Douglass, Lydia Maria Child, Nathaniel Hawthorne, William Gilmore Simms, John Pendleton Kennedy, Charles Sumner, and Henry Herbert, to situate an era of developing national acrimony along longer historical and transnational curves, forming an account of national crisis that situated questions of a domestic political bearing at transatlantic remove from northern and southern combatants.

This book investigates the post-revolutionary rituals and discourses of enchantment, a category of mystical experience uniquely capable of producing new forms of popular power and social affiliation. American Enchantment views this phenomenon as a response to a signature problem in post-revolutionary culture: how to represent the people in the absence of the king’s body and other traditional monarchical forms. In the early United States, this absence inaugurates new attempts to conjure the people and to reconstruct the symbolic order. For many in this era, these efforts converge on enchantment. This pattern appears in works by Charles Brockden Brown, Washington Irving, Catharine Sedgwick, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, as well as in the rites of George Washington’s presidency, the religious prophecy of the Second Great Awakening, the tar and featherings of the Whiskey Rebellion, and other ritual practices such as romance reading. Recognizing the role of enchantment in constituting the people overturns some of our most commonsense assumptions: above all, the people are not simply a flesh-and-blood substance but also a supernatural force. This project makes a significant contribution to interdisciplinary scholarship on the symbolic foundations of sovereignty by arguing that the new popular sovereignty is no longer an embodied presence fixed in space—in a king, nor even in a president, an individual, a group of persons, or the state—but a numinous force dispersed through time. That is, the people, counter to all traditional thought, are a supernatural and temporal process.

This study examines how the concept of conversion and specifically the legacy of the doctrine of preparation, as articulated in Puritan Reformed theology and transplanted to the Massachusetts Bay colony, remained a vital cultural force shaping developments in American literature and philosophy. It begins by discussing the testimonies of conversion collected by the Puritan minister Thomas Shepard, which reveal an active pursuit of belief by prospective church members occurring at the intersection of experience, perception, doctrine, affections, and intellect. This pursuit of belief, codified in the morphology of conversion, and originally undertaken by the Puritans as a way to conceptualize redemption in a fallen state, established the epistemological contours for what Jonathan Edwards, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and William James would theorize as a conductive imaginary—consciousness imagined as a space organized or that self-organizes around the dynamics and tensions between abstract truth and concrete realities, certainty and uncertainty, and perception and objects perceived. Each writer offers a picture of consciousness as both a receptive and active force responsible for translating the effects of experience and generating original relations with self, community, and God. This study demonstrates that each writer “ministered” to their audiences by articulating a method or habit of mind in order to foster an individual’s continual efforts at regeneration, conceived by all the subjects of this study as a matter of converting semantics, that is, a dedicated willingness to seeking out personal and cultural renewal through the continual process of attaching new meaning and value to ordinary contexts.

The Architecture of Concepts proposes a radically new way of understanding the history of ideas. Taking as its example human rights, it develops a distinctive kind of conceptual analysis that enables us to see with precision how the concept of human rights was formed in the eighteenth century. The first chapter outlines an innovative account of concepts as cultural entities. The second develops an original methodology for recovering the historical formation of the concept of human rights based on data extracted from digital archives. This enables us to track the construction of conceptual architectures over time. Having established the architecture of the concept of human rights, the book then examines two key moments in its historical formation: the First Continental Congress in 1775 and the publication of Tom Paine’s Rights of Man in 1792. Arguing that we have yet to fully understand or appreciate the consequences of the eighteenth-century invention of the concept “rights of man,” the final chapter addresses our problematic contemporary attempts to leverage human rights as the most efficacious way of achieving universal equality.

Barbarism and civilization form one of the oldest and most rigid oppositions in Western history. According to this dichotomy, barbarism functions as the negative standard through which “civilization” fosters its self-definition and superiority by labeling others “barbarians.” Since the 1990s, and especially since 9/11, these terms have become increasingly popular in Western political and cultural rhetoric—a rhetoric that divides the world into forces of good and evil. This study intervenes in this recent trend and interrogates contemporary and historical uses of barbarism, arguing that barbarism also has a disruptive, insurgent potential. The book recasts barbarism as a productive concept, finding that it is a common thread in works of literature, art, and theory. By dislodging barbarism from its conventional contexts, this book reclaims barbarism's edge and proposes it as a useful theoretical tool.

A literary biography of Franklin’s writings on the British Empire and its relationship to the British North America, this book assesses Franklin’s intellectual life by examining his writings on economics, society, politics, and the environment. It shows how Franklin’s youthful reading and writings influenced his values, which had their basis in the early modern liberalism of the seventeenth century. Franklin concluded early in his life that people ought to have central freedoms of conscience and person, including free speech and a free press to voice their concerns about government, the ability to move about freely to pursue better labor opportunities, and the ability to elect their own governors and establish their own laws. This book identifies several moments indicating Franklin’s growing belief in the necessity of American independence, beginning with letters he wrote to William Shirley in the 1750s, which, along with Franklin’s Albany Plan of Union, speak to the potential for North America if self-rule and self-determination were possible. Franklin moved further toward independence after he witnessed the poverty and destitution of agricultural laborers in Ireland in the early 1770s. By 1773, based on decisions being rendered about British incursions in India, Franklin conceived American sovereignty resided with Americans, not with the Crown. He believed that Americans who acquired their land by peaceful treaty with Indians held sovereignty over that acquired land. This view, based in his understanding of the law of his day, placed power squarely in the hands of Britons in North America.

Quantifiable citizenship—in the form of birth certificates, census forms, and immigration quotas—is so ubiquitous that today it appears ahistorical. Yet before the modern colonial era, there was neither a word for “population” in the sense of numbers of people, nor agreement that monarchs should count their subjects. Much of the work of naturalizing the view that people can be represented as populations took place far outside government institutions and philosophical treatises. It occurred, instead, in the work of colonial writers such as Mary Rowlandson, who found, in the act of counting the “vast numbers” of Indians who held her captive, a way to imagine fixed boundaries between intermingling groups. This book explores the imaginative, personal, and narrative writings that performed the cultural work of normalizing the enumeration of bodies. By repositioning and unearthing a literary prehistory of population science, the book shows that representing individuals as numbers was a central element of colonial projects. Early colonial writings that describe routine, and even intimate, interactions offer a window into the way people wove the quantifiable forms of subjectivity made available by population counts into everyday life. Whether trying to make sense of plantation slavery, frontier warfare, rapid migration, or global commerce, writers framed questions about human relationships across different cultures and generations in terms of population.

This book traces the development of a critical practice within African American literature, art, and activism that identifies and critiques the widespread appropriation of classical tradition to the projects of exceptionalist historiography and cultural white supremacy in the United States. This appropriative method has typically figured the United States as the inheritor of the best traditions of classical antiquity and thus as the standard bearer for the idea of civilization. Where dominant narratives—articulated through political speeches and editorials, poetry and the visual arts, and the monumental architecture of Washington, DC—envision the political project of the United States as modeled on ancient Rome yet destined to surpass it in the unfolding of an exceptional history, the writers, artists, and activists this book considers have connected modern America to the ancient world through the institution of slavery and the geopolitics of empire. The book tracks this critique over more than two centuries, from Phillis Wheatley’s poetry in the era of Revolution, through the antislavery writings of David Walker, William Wells Brown, and the black newspapers of the antebellum period, to the works of Charles Chesnutt, Toni Morrison, and other twentieth-century writers, before concluding with the monumental sculpture of the contemporary artist Kara Walker.

Episodic Poetics merges social and political history with narrative theory to explain the early American fascination with the piecemeal plot across the period’s major genres of prose writing, from the wildly plotted novel to the peculiarly constructed memoir, the miscellany, and the linked serial essays of the ratification debate. This book shows how episodic forms gave variegated shape to the social, political, and economic conflicts that defined the early republic in the wake of the American Revolution and constitutional consolidation. Episodic Poetics takes the form of this literature seriously as a central case in world literary history, reassessing a literary unit—the episode—that has vexed theories of literary form since Aristotle’s Poetics. Through close and historically animated readings of The Federalist, Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography, and novels by Charles Brockden Brown, along with hitherto understudied texts and ephemera such as Washington Irving’s Salmagundi, Susanna Rowson’s Trials of the Human Heart, and the memoirs of the metalworker and failed entrepreneur John Fitch, this book recounts literary history not as the easy victory of grand nationalist ambitions but, rather, as a series of social struggles expressed through writers’ recurring engagement with incompletely integrated forms.

Exorbitant Enlightenment offers new ways to think about eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century literature and culture. It brings into focus a constellation of relatively unknown, pre-1790s Anglo-German relations in Britain, many of which are so radical—so exorbitant—that they ask us to fundamentally rethink the way we do literary and intellectual history, especially when it comes to Enlightenment and Romanticism. This polyglot book delivers two of the great, untold stories of the eighteenth century. The first story uncovers a forgotten Anglo-German network of thought and writing in Britain between 1700 and 1790. From this Anglo-German context emerges the second story: a set of radical figures and institutions that are exorbitant, they leave the specified tracks of literary history and present us with a literary history that explodes the difference between the Enlightenment and Romanticism. These figures and institutions include the Moravians in 1750s London, Henry Fuseli (1741–25), and Johann Caspar Lavater (1741–1801), but also the two most radical, notorious, and most exorbitant figures: William Blake (1757–1827) and Johann Georg Hamann (1730–88). Over eight comparative chapters, the book presents a constellation of case studies that show how these figures and institutions shake up our common understanding of British literary and European intellectual history. Exorbitant Enlightenment takes seriously, and pays particular attention to, the exorbitant dimensions of Blake and Hamann and how once we take them seriously, these exorbitant figures allow us to uncover and address some of our own critical orthodoxies.

By combining the techniques of textual criticism and the insights of close reading, Generous Mistakes offers new perspectives not only on two of Henry James’s major novels (The Portrait of a Lady and The Ambassadors) but also on the process by which they became the books we know—or think we know. Through a better understanding of the conditions of production that affected James’s author function, we achieve a deeper appreciation of the historical contingencies of his artistry. Closely examining new forms of evidence (even fingerprints), Generous Mistakes contends that authorship is a hybrid construction, a sometimes unpredictable sequence of different forms of practice, each of which contributes meaningfully to the texts we read and analyze. Offering a sustained examination of the “textual condition” of James’s work—going beyond the relatively familiar ground of authorial revision—this study brings into sharper focus the complex and sometimes arbitrary factors that contributed to the making of two masterpieces of modern fiction and to the Legend of the Master who wrote them.

When Lord Byron toasted Napoleon for summarily executing a bookseller and when American satirist Fitz-Greene Halleck picketed his New York publisher for trying to starve him, both writers were taking part in a time-honored tradition: calling out publishers as unregenerate capitalists. However apocryphal, both stories speak to what writer Gail Hamilton called “the conflict of the ages,” the long feud between and writers and publishers over the way the business of print ought to be conducted. Michael Everton explores this feud in the early United States, where the much-discussed relationship between morality and money meant that debates over business of authorship and literary publishing were simultaneously debates over the ethics of capitalism. This book shows that the moral discourse authors and publishers used in these debates was not intended as a distraction from the “real” issues affecting American print culture. Instead, morality was itself at issue. Drawing on a diverse archive of manuscript and print sources, the book argues that in their business correspondence and fiction, in their diaries and essays, authors and publishers talked so much about ethics not to obfuscate their convictions but to clarify them in a commercial world preoccupied by the meanings and efficacy of moral beliefs. This study illustrates that ethics should matter to literary and book historians as much as it has come to matter—again—to literary critics and theorists.

Deliberation, in recent years, has emerged as a form of civic engagement worth reclaiming. This book combines historical literary analysis and political theory in order to demonstrate that current democratic practices of deliberation are rooted in the civic rhetoric that flourished in the early American republic. Though the U.S. Constitution made deliberation central to republican self-governance, the ethical emphasis on group deliberation often conflicted with the rhetorical focus on persuasive speech. From Alexis de Tocqueville's ideas about the deliberative basis of American democracy through the works of Walt Whitman, John Dewey, John F. Kennedy, and Martin Luther King Jr., this book shows how writers and speakers have made the aesthetic and political possibilities of deliberation central to their autobiographies, manifestos, novels, and orations. Examining seven key writers from the early American republic—including James Fenimore Cooper, David Crockett, and Daniel Webster—whose works of deliberative imagination explored the intersections of style and democratic substance, the book offers a mode of historical and textual analysis that displays the wide range of resources imaginative language can contribute to political life.

Inventing Eden builds on recent environmental criticism to chart the ways in which colonial New England writers replaced their initial topographical optimism with an interest in recovering the somatic, intellectual, spiritual, and social perfections that Adam and Eve enjoyed in the biblical Garden. As they appropriated and adapted Old World beliefs about the primitive Eden and a coming millennial paradise to their New World surroundings over the first two centuries of European colonization in New England, Puritans and Quakers disciplined their physical and figurative bodies in an effort to reclaim a prelapsarian physiological temperance. Previous scholars have noted that colonists described New World landscapes as edenic, but Inventing Eden uncovers the relationship between the New England interest in paradise and many of the iconic intellectual artifacts and social movements of colonial North America. The Bay Psalm Book, Quaker grammar, and Harvard Yard are products of this seventeenth-century desire for edenic purity; so, too, is the evangelical emphasis of the Great Awakening, the doctrine of natural law popularized by the Declaration of Independence, and the judicial decision that abolished slavery in Massachusetts. Progressing chronologically and thematically, the individual chapters of Inventing Eden trace the transatlantic development of edenic thought from the works of English authors such as Francis Bacon, George Herbert, and John Milton to the increasingly American writings of Anne Bradstreet, Jonathan Edwards, and Benjamin Franklin, among others.

This book treats the business corporation as an imaginative construct, a fiction that informs other fictions and exerts agency in the world. The book uses literary texts--novels, plays, poetry--as well as economic texts by writers as varied as Karl Marx, Adam Smith, John Maynard Keynes, and Ronald Coase, to explore what it calls the cultural unconscious of the business corporation during its rise to autonomy in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. Emerging out of the “incorporated” institutions of the Middle Ages, the towns, guilds, universities, and charities that were given royal patents or licenses to enable groups of people to carry out particular activities, the business corporation of the modern period has become the pre-eminent agent of the modern economic system. As such, corporations have often been seen to threaten the autonomy of individual persons. Literature Incorporated argues that the modern person and the modern individual are concepts that have long been deeply interwoven, and have from the early modern period been inextricable from each other.

“Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm,” wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson in 1841. While this statement may read like an innocuous truism today, the claim would have been controversial in the antebellum United States when enthusiasm was a hotly contested term associated with religious fanaticism and poetic inspiration, revolutionary politics and imaginative excess. In analyzing the language of enthusiasm in philosophy, religion, politics, and literature, John Mac Kilgore uncovers a tradition of enthusiasm linked to a politics of emancipation. The dissenting voices chronicled here fought against what they viewed as tyranny while using their writings to forge international or antinationalistic political affiliations. Pushing his analysis across national boundaries, Kilgore contends that American enthusiastic literature, unlike the era’s concurrent sentimental counterpart, stressed democratic resistance over domestic reform as it navigated the global political sphere. By analyzing a range of canonical American authors—including William Apess, Phillis Wheatley, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Walt Whitman—Kilgore places their works in context with the causes, wars, and revolutions that directly or indirectly engendered them. In doing so, he makes a unique and compelling case for enthusiasm’s centrality in the shaping of American literary history.

The book explores the creation and extension of U.S. jurisdiction in the antebellum period, particularly over Native Americans and former Mexicans. It examines how U.S. law recodes the identities and territoriality of these populations and the self-depictions they offer in nonfictional texts. The government's narration of national space is haunted and disturbed by the persistence of the political geographies of peoples made domestic in the absorption of indigenous and Mexican lands. Exploring the confrontation between U.S. law and the self-representations of those once-alien peoples subjected to it, the book focuses on Indian removal in the southeast and western Great Lakes and the annexation of Texas and California. In foregrounding self-determination, a central concept in current international debates over the rights of indigenous peoples, the project challenges the somewhat amorphous image of betweenness conveyed by such prominent critical formulations as "the borderlands," "the middle ground," and "the contact zone," examining a variety of writings (including memorials, autobiographies, and histories) produced by imperially displaced populations for the ways that they index specific forms of collectivity and placemaking disavowed by U.S. policy. More specifically, it shows how U.S. institutions legitimize conquest as consensual by creating forms of official recognition and speech for dominated groups that reinforce the obviousness of U.S. mappings and authority, and it demonstrates how forcibly internalized populations disjoint, refunction, and contest the roles created for them so as to create room in public discourse for critiquing U.S. efforts to displace their existing forms of land tenure and governance.

This book compares modern literary treatments of the theme of millennium—stories of the “end of the world,” conceived as the ultimate battle between good and evil resulting in the institution of an utterly new social order. The book compares fiction, plays, poetry, and other works written in English, French, Portuguese, and Spanish representing a wide spectrum of communities across the Americas, from the colonial origins to the present, from the letters of Columbus to the Left Behind series of novels. The goal is to understand better a thematic that has defined the Americas since the arrival of Europeans, as a “technology of the self” that furthers national and imperial agendas, but also as a discourse of resistance used by native populations, and that has provided an inexhaustible source of literary plots and tropes. This study brings together historical, literary, and ethnographic records to show that the repeated eruptions of millenarian conflict in the Americas have been both acts of resistance to the eradication of traditional ways of life in the process of nationalization and globalization, and also important sources in the search for origins and foundations. Americans tend to understand their origins by narrating their End. Since this End is always imagined rather than experienced, literature becomes a vital element in its propagation.

The American Revolution and the Civil War bracket roughly eight decades of formative change in a republic created in 1776 by a gesture that was both rhetorical and performative. The subsequent construction of U.S. national identity influenced virtually all art forms, especially prose fiction, until internal conflict disrupted the project of nation-building. This volume reassesses, in an authoritative way, the principal forms and features of the emerging American novel. It includes chapters on: the beginnings of the novel in the United States; the novel and nation-building; the publishing industry; leading novelists of Antebellum America; eminent early American novels; cultural influences on the novel; and subgenres within the novel form during this period.