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Traditional narratives of the period leading up to the Civil War are invariably framed in geographical terms. The sectional descriptors of the North, South, and West, like the wartime categories of Union, Confederacy, and border states, mean little without reference to a map of the United States. This book contends that antislavery writers consistently refused those standard terms. Through the idiom this book names “abolitionist geography,” these writers instead expressed their dissenting views about the westward extension of slavery, the intensification of the internal slave trade, and the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law by appealing to other anachronistic, partial, or entirely fictional north-south and east-west axes. Abolitionism’s West, for instance, rarely reached beyond the Mississippi River, but its East looked to Britain for ideological inspiration, its North habitually traversed the Canadian border, and its South often spanned the geopolitical divide between the United States and the British Caribbean. The book traces this geography of dissent through the work of Martin Delany, Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Wells Brown, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, among others. This book explores new relationships between New England transcendentalism and the British West Indies; African-American cosmopolitanism, Britain, and Haiti; sentimental fiction, Ohio, and Liberia; John Brown’s Appalachia and circum-Caribbean marronage.

This book explores a reader's interactions with advertising during a period when not only consumption but advertising itself became established as a pleasure. The book argues that participation in advertising, rather than top-down dictation by advertisers, made advertising a central part of American culture. It tracks new forms of fictional realism that contained brand name references, courtship stories, and other fictional forms. As magazines became dependant on advertising rather than sales for their revenues, women's magazines led the way in making consumers of readers through the interplay of fiction, editorials, and advertising. The book takes the bicycle as a case study. At once invisible, familiar, and intrusive, advertising both shaped fiction of the period and was shaped by it. The book unearths the lively conversations among writers and advertisers about the new prevalence of advertising for mass-produced nationally distributed products.

American literature abounds with orphans who experience adoption or placements that resemble adoption. These stories do more than recount the adventures of children living away from home. They tell an American story of family and national identity. In narratives from the seventeenth to the early twentieth century, adoption functions as narrative event and trope that describes the American migratory experience, the impact of Calvinist faith, and the growth of democratic individualism. The roots of literary adoption appear in the discourse of Puritan settlers, who ambivalently took leave of their birth parent country and portrayed themselves as abandoned children. Believing they were the chosen children of God, they also prayed for spiritual adoption and emulated God’s grace by extending adoption to others. Nineteenth-century adoption literature evolves from the notion of adoption as salvation and from simultaneous attachments to the Old and the New Worlds. In popular domestic fiction, adoption reflects a focus on nurturing in child rearing, increased mobility in the nation, and middle-class concerns over immigration and urbanization, assuaged when the orphan finds a proper, loving home. Adoption signals fresh starts and the opportunity for success without genealogical constraints, especially for white males. Affected by gender and racial biases, it often entails dependency for girls and children of color. A complex signifier of difference, adoption gives voice to the sometimes contradictory calls of origins and fresh beginnings, and to feelings of worthiness and unworthiness. In writings from Cotton Mather to Edith Wharton, it both imitates and offers an alternative to the genealogical norm, evoking ambivalence as it shapes national mythologies.

American Blood foregrounds a culture-wide struggle over the definition and value of the family in the nineteenth-century United States. This study offers a new vision of the American novel in this tumultuous period, highlighting works that protest the overvaluation of kinship in American culture, depicting the domestic family as antagonistic to the political enterprise of the United States. Far from venerating the family as the nucleus of the nation, these novels imagine, even welcome, the decline of this institution and the social order it supports. Despite the founders’ concern that unseemly reverence for family relations might taint the new republic, the familial rhetoric of nationalism was deployed so energetically throughout the nineteenth century that reverence for the family came to seem like a core American value. Imaginative literature in this period retains an interest in the value of cutting blood ties, prizing the American dream of freedom from inherited identity. This study highlights works that criticize the expansion of the concept of family, viewing kinship as not only inadequate but dangerous in application to politics, suggesting that democratic citizenship should serve as the basis for coalitions across ascriptive differences. Six chapters chart the literary representation of the American family in relation to legal, scientific, literary, and political discourses from antebellum abolitionism through the Reconstruction suffrage debates, the burgeoning of feminism, and the “nadir” of post-Emancipation African American experience at the turn of the twentieth century.

How is a classic book to be defined? How much time must elapse before a work may be judged a “classic”? And among all the works of American literature, which deserve the designation? This book presents a short list of “relative” classics—works whose appeal may not be universal but which nonetheless have occupied an important place in our culture for more than a century. These books have survived the abuses of time—neglect, contempt, indifference, willful readings, excesses of praise and hyperbole. The book bestows the term classic on just five American works: Melville's Moby-Dick, Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, Thoreau's Walden, Whitman's Leaves of Grass, and Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Examining each separately, each chapter discusses how the writings have been received and interpreted, and offers contemporary readings, suggesting, for example, that in the post-9/11 era, Moby-Dick may be rewardingly read as a revenge tragedy. The book extends an irresistible invitation to open the pages of these American classics again, demonstrating with wit and acuity how very much they have to say to us now.

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.

The purpose of this book is to examine the nature of democratic thought and expression in American experimental poetry, from Walt Whitman in the mid-nineteenth century to George Oppen and Frank O'Hara in the mid‐late twentieth. Its origins lie in Alexis de Tocqueville's discussion of ‘Some Sources of Poetic Inspiration in Democracies’ in the second volume of his Democracy in America. It begins with a chapter on Tocqueville and Whitman, followed by a re‐evaluation of the flawed republican humanism of Ezra Pound in the light of the thought of Hannah Arendt. The other main poets considered are Robert Creeley, Emily Dickinson, Mina Loy, Lorine Niedecker, Muriel Rukeyser, Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams. The book argues against the narrowly ideological interpretation of politics that dominates contemporary literary studies, an attitude that can be traced back to the legacies of Marx and Freud, and conceives of ideology in deterministic terms as unconscious political alignment. To that extent it echoes Tocqueville's concern to underline the differences between his own methods and perspectives and the historical determinism of his contemporaries. The book draws upon a wide range of thinkers, including Madison, Tocqueville, Kant, Marx, Freud, Heidegger, Adorno, Riesman, Arendt, Benhabib and Cavell, as it seeks to expand and develop Tocqueville's circumspect humanist critical trajectory. The chapters are conceived as a series of innovative dialogical constellations, to which the close reading of poetry is central. The aim throughout is to measure the thought of the poets or their poems against the thoughts of those who are more often called thinkers.

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.

This book weaves together literary criticism and historical narrative to describe the strong friendships between men that supported and inspired some of America's greatest writing—the Gothic novels of Charles Brockden Brown, the essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson, and the novels of Herman Melville. The book traces the genealogy of these friendships through a series of stories. A dapper English spy inspires a Quaker boy to run away from home. Three Philadelphia gentlemen conduct a romance through diaries and letters in the 1780s. Flighty teenager Charles Brockden Brown metamorphoses into a horror novelist by treating his friends as his literary guinea pigs. Emerson exchanges glances with a Harvard classmate but sacrifices his crush on the altar of literature—a decision Margaret Fuller invites him to reconsider two decades later. Throughout, this book demonstrates the many ways in which the struggle to commit feelings to paper informed the shape and texture of American literature.

American Terror interrogates the origins, contexts, and significance of the distinctive tone of terror within a major strain of early and nineteenth-century American literature. Contrary to critical tendencies to literary terror as a rejection or contrary reaction to Enlightenment thought, this book draws upon new work in affect theory and the refreshed interest in American intellectual history to argue that American authors sought through it to produce the peculiar affect of scientific objectivity: the feeling of thinking. As what counts as knowledge comes to be aligned with a set of abstract universal rules and processes—the scientific method, propositional logic, geometric models of analysis—literary terror does not reject such progress as unfeeling, but rather sets out to describe it in feeling. Employing close reading in concert with original historical research, this book threads the story of terror’s relation to philosophy through three American writers who not only write terror, but write about terror. It begins with Jonathan Edwards’s theoretical defense of terror as a sensation of truth, develops through Edgar Allan Poe’s refinement of terror’s sensation of truth within an aesthetics of analytical methodology, and culminates in Herman Melville’s dramatization of the consequences exacted by this terrific perspective: a radically unknowable universe that everywhere refuses to relax its demands to be known. Through this critical repositioning of literary terror, American Terror charts how the dark strain of American literature carves a previously unaccounted for affective curve in the route of philosophy from Enlightenment idealism to poststructuralism.

This book charts the phenomenon of the love of Britain that emerged after the Revolution and remains in the character of U.S. society and class, the style of academic life, and the idea of American intellectualism. But as the author shows, this Anglophilia was more than just an elite nostalgia; it was popular devotion that made reverence for British tradition instrumental to the psychological innovations of democracy. Anglophilia spoke to fantasies of cultural belonging, polite sociability, and, finally, deference itself as an affective practice within egalitarian politics. The author traces the wide-ranging effects of Anglophilia on American literature, art, and intellectual life in the early nineteenth century, as well as its influence in arguments against slavery, in the politics of Union, and in the dialectics of liberty and loyalty before the Civil War. By working beyond narratives of British influence, the author highlights a more intricate culture of American response, one that included Whig elites, college students, radical democrats, urban immigrants, and African Americans. Ultimately, the book argues that the love of Britain was not simply a fetish or form of shame—a release from the burdens of American culture—but an anachronistic structure of attachment in which U.S. identity was lived in other languages of national expression.

This rediscovery of the bold cosmopolitan activism and professional literary adventures of six American writers argues that antebellum authors never imagined ‘America’ without thinking of other nations and never defined it outside the context of a network of global relationships. As this book challenges theories of national exceptionalism, it also questions the exceptional status of literature itself. By looking beyond authors’ familiar literary works, this study illuminates their practices of Atlantic citizenship. From leading authors Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Ralph Waldo Emerson to popular writer Grace Greenwood, the figures who animate this book shape their careers in the fields of education, journalism, public lecturing, and editing in productive relation to their development as imaginative writers. To see Frederick Douglass as a fiery newspaper editor as well as an autobiographer, to witness Margaret Fuller reporting from the front lines of battle in revolutionary Rome as well as writing her country’s first feminist treatise, and to witness Walt Whitman co-producing foreign editions of his work with British poets as well as exuberantly breaking free from verse strictures on the page is to comprehend more fully the ways in which these writers acted in the transatlantic sphere. By doing so, they are able to achieve critical distance from the United States and, paradoxically, to catalyse its ongoing growth.

At the end of his long life, Samuel Clemens felt driven to write a truthful account of what he regarded as the flaws in his character and the errors of his ways. His attempt to tell the unvarnished truth about himself is preserved in nearly 250 autobiographical dictations. In order to encourage complete veracity, he decided from the outset that these would be published only posthumously. Nevertheless, Clemens's autobiography is singularly unrevealing. This book argues that, by contrast, it is in his fiction that Clemens most fully — if often inadvertently — reveals himself. He was, he confessed, like a cat who labours in vain to bury the waste that he has left behind. The author argues that he wrote out of an enduring need to come to terms with his remembered experiences — not to memorialize the past, but to transform it. By all accounts — including his own — Clemens's special curse was guilt. He was unable to forgive himself for the deaths of those closest to him — from his siblings' death in childhood to the deaths of his own children. Nor could he reconcile himself to his role in the Civil War, his part in the duel that prompted his departure from Virginia City in 1864, and — worst of all — his sense of moral complicity in the crimes of slavery. Tracing the theme of bad faith in all of Clemens's major writing, but with special attention to the late work, the author sheds new light on a tormented moral life. His book challenges conventional assumptions about the humorist's personality and creativity, directing attention to what William Dean Howells describes as the depths of a nature whose tragical seriousness broke in the laughter which the unwise took for the whole of him.

The photographer and reformer Jacob Riis once wrote, “I have seen an armful of daisies keep the peace of a block better than a policeman and his club.” Riis was not alone in his belief that beauty could tame urban chaos, but are aesthetic experiences always a social good? Could aesthetics also inspire violent crime, working-class unrest, and racial murder? To answer these questions, this book turns to those who debated claims that art could democratize culture—civic reformers, anarchists, novelists, civil rights activists, and college professors—to reveal that beauty provides unexpected occasions for radical, even revolutionary, political thinking. It explores the intersection of beauty and violence by examining university lectures and course materials on aesthetics from a century ago along with riots, acts of domestic terrorism, magic lantern exhibitions, and other public spectacles. Philosophical aesthetics, realist novels, urban photography, and black periodicals, the book argues, inspired and instigated all sorts of collective social endeavors, from the progressive nature of tenement reform to the horrors of lynching. Discussing Jane Addams, W. E. B. Du Bois, Charlie Chaplin, William Dean Howells, and Riis as aesthetic theorists in the company of Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Schiller, the book ultimately suggests that the distance separating academic thinking and popular wisdom about social transformation is narrower than is generally assumed.

This book addresses the specific conditions under and the pointed implications with which an ancient story about different orders of gods dueling over the fate of humanity became such a prominent fixture of Atlantic modernity. The Prometheus myth, for several reasons—its fortuitous geographical associations with both Africa and the Caucasus; its resonant iconography of bodily suffering; and its longue-duree function as a limit case for a Platonic-cum-Christian political theology of the Absolute, became a crucial site for conceptualizing human liberation in the immanent space of a finite globe structured by white domination and black slavery. The titan’s defiant theft of fire from the regnant gods was translated through a high-stakes racial coding either as an “African” revolt against the cosmic status quo that augured a pure autonomy—a black revolutionary immanence against which idealist philosophers like Hegel defined their projects and slaveholders defended their lives and positions—or as a “Caucasian” reflection of the divine power evidently working in favor of Euro-Christian civilization that transmuted the naked egoism of conquest into a righteous heteronomy—Euro-Christian civilization’s mobilization by the Absolute or its internalization of a transcendent principle of universal Reason. The Prometheus myth was available and attractive to its eighteenth- and nineteenth-century revivalists and reinventors—from canonical figures like Voltaire, Percy Shelley, Frederick Douglass, and Karl Marx to anonymous contributors of ephemera to abolitionist periodicals—not so much as a handy emblem of an abstract humanism but as the potential linchpin of a racialist philosophy of history.

What does it mean to own something? How does a thing become mine? Liberal philosophy since John Locke has championed the salutary effects of private property but has avoided the more difficult questions of property’s ontology. This book argues that antebellum American literature is obsessed with precisely these questions of ownership. Reading slave narratives, gothic romances, city-mystery novels, and a range of other property narratives, this book unearths a wide-ranging literary effort to understand the nature of ownership, the phenomenology of possession. In authors as diverse as Charles Brockden Brown, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Elizabeth Stoddard, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, and William Gilmore Simms, this book reveals an ontological—and embodied—account of property. In these antebellum texts, ownership is not an abstract legal form but a lived relation, a dynamic of embodiment emerging within specific cultural spaces—a disputed frontier, a city agitated by class conflict—each of which stamps that embodiment with a particular place and time. Employing an innovative phenomenological approach that combines careful historical work with an array of European philosophies, this book challenges existing accounts that map property practice along a trajectory of abstraction and virtualization. It also reorients recent Americanist work in emotion and affect by detailing a broader phenomenology of ownership, one extending beyond emotion to such sensory experiences as touch, taste, and vision. This productive blend of phenomenology and history uncovers deep-seated anxieties—and enthusiasms—about property across antebellum culture.

This book explores the construction and emergence of “Bohemia” in American literature and culture. Simultaneously a literary trope, a cultural nexus, and a socio-economic landscape, la vie bohème traveled to the United States from the Parisian Latin Quarter in the 1850s. At first the province of small artistic coteries, Bohemia soon inspired a popular vogue, embodied in restaurants, clubs, neighborhoods, novels, poems, and dramatic performances across the country. This study follows la vie bohème from its earliest expressions in the U.S. until its explosion in Greenwich Village in the 1910s. Although Bohemia was everywhere in nineteenth- and twentieth-century American culture, it has received relatively little scholarly attention. This book fills this critical void, discovering and exploring the many textual and geographic spaces in which Bohemia was conjured. It not only provides access to a neglected cultural phenomenon, but also to a new and compelling way of charting the development of American literature and culture.

This book examines the literary culture of Victorian mass settler emigration as it circulated across a broad range of contemporary periodicals. It argues that the Victorian periodical was an inherently mobile form, which had an unrivalled capacity to register mass settler emigration and moderate its disruptive potential. The first three chapters focus on settler emigration genres that featured within a range of mainstream, middle-class periodicals, incorporating the analysis of emigrant voyage texts, emigration-themed Christmas stories, and serialized novels about settlement. These genres are cohesive, domestic, and reassuring, and thus of a different character from the adventure stories often associated with Victorian empire. The second part of the book brings to light a feminist and radical periodical emigration literature that often drew upon mainstream representations of emigration in order to challenge their dominant formations. It examines emigration texts featured in the Victorian feminist and women’s presses, Chartist anti-emigration literature, utopian emigration narratives, and a corpus of transnational westerns. Alongside its analysis of more ephemeral emigration texts, the book offers fresh readings of important works by Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Thomas Martin Wheeler, and others. It also maps its analysis of settler emigration onto broader debates about Victorian literature and culture, Victorian empire, the global circulation of texts, periodical form, and the role of digitization within Victorian studies.

Tracing the Civil War dead’s representational afterlife acroᶊ an array of historical, visual, and literary documents from 1861 to 1914, this book shows that they played a central, complex, and paradoxical role in how Americans understood the “modernity” of the United States. Amid the turbulence of the postbellum era, the dead provided an illusion of coherence, intelligibility, and continuity in the national self, and yet they also focalized American society’s central philosophical and moral conflicts. Recirculated through the networks of information and meaning by which a culture understands and creates itself, they functioned, and continue to function, as a form of symbolic currency in a memorial economy linking the Civil War era to the present. Reconstructing the strategies by which postwar American society reimagined the Civil War dead, this book argues that a strain of critical thought was alert to this necropolitical dynamic from the very years of the war itself.

Ralp Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau are the most celebrated odd couple of nineteenth-century American literature. Appearing to play the roles of benign mentor and eager disciple, they can also be seen as bitter rivals: America's foremost literary statesman, protective of his reputation, and an ambitious and sometimes refractory protege. The truth, this book maintains, is that Emerson and Thoreau were complementary literary geniuses, mutually inspiring and inspired. This book focuses on Emerson and Thoreau as writers. It traces their individual achievements and their points of intersection, arguing that both men, starting from a shared belief in the importance of “self-culture”, produced a body of writing that helped move a decidedly provincial New England readership into the broader arena of international culture.