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This chapter evaluates how the antebellum period sees the widespread acceptance of fiction as an important branch of American letters and the increasing ascendance of an understanding of fiction reading as a private leisure activity oriented toward moral and aesthetic self-culture. It focuses on historical fiction, because its enduring popularity allows it to capture a subtle, but significant, transformation in how fiction was discussed, debated, and valued across this period. Historical fiction's important role in the widespread acceptance of fiction in the antebellum United States has been well documented. What has been overlooked is a related shift in how historical fictionality was justified across this period that crystallizes the terms of this wider acceptance. The evolving justifications for historical fiction reveal a gradual but decisive shift in the discourse about fiction, as a set of intertwined aesthetic and moral standards for valuing and evaluating fiction increasingly supplanted the intertwined epistemological and moral questions that had predominated in earlier debates.

This chapter assesses how modern scholarship's tendency to treat most fabricated narratives as self-evidently fictional novels has obscured how Jacksonian writers, such as Edgar Allan Poe and Robert Montgomery Bird, developed new liminal modes of fictional and nonfictional address to encourage readers to scrutinize the tacit assumptions shaping their reading. Their literary hoaxes capture fictionists' simultaneous participation in and disavowal of the “artful deception” that featured so prominently in antebellum popular culture. Poe and Bird eschewed conventional fictionality to raise anew the very epistemological questions about delusion, credulity, and fraud that were becoming more marginal to discussions of fiction over this very decade. While the chapter situates these hoaxes in relation to this era's general fascination with humbug, it focuses more narrowly on two texts: Bird's Sheppard Lee, Written by Himself (1836) and Poe's Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838). These texts reveal, in an especially vivid way, how the dominant history of the novel paradigm has obscured the widely differing varieties of fictional address circulating in the antebellum United States.

This chapter provides a background on the relationship of religious media and the landscape in the antebellum United States in order to rethink the meaning of space in American culture. It traverses a range of genres and media including sermons, landscape paintings, aesthetic treatises, abolitionist newspapers, slave narratives, novels, and grave markers. It also traces the birth of a distinctly modern form of sacred space at the nexus of mass print culture, the physical spaces of an expanding and urbanizing nation, and the religious images and narratives that ordinary Americans used to orient their lives. The chapter investigates the efforts of Protestant evangelical publishing societies to teach readers to use the landscape to understand their own spiritual lives and their role in sacred history. It talks about the “evangelical space” that ultimately spread beyond devotional culture to infuse popular literature, art, and politics.

This introductory chapter presents the critically and historically embedded understanding of the freedom celebrated in the literary and cultural histories of transatlantic abolitionism. Literary and cultural historians have often turned their gaze towards the fugitive’s clandestine movements. Although that work has been of crucial importance, it has overlooked the complex ways in which traveling slaves challenged, even more profoundly than did the fugitive, the cultural logic of slavery and freedom. As such, the book examines the forgotten stories of these traveling slaves to limn the legal construction of freedom, will, and consent in the antebellum United States. It shows the way enslaved women and their children negotiated the unexpected predicaments that the laws of freedom and slavery created in their lives.

This chapter analyzes literal and symbolic examples of human consumption in the antebellum United States. It begins with a discussion of the Essex affair, which involved the consumption of four black men in the nineteenth century. Similar cases during the period involving black men continue to evoke strong feelings of shame and dishonor among American whites and Europeans today. These cases also illuminate how “the choice” made by whites to eat black men aboard ships coincided with ideologies of Negro inferiority and with the logic and practice of chattel bondage in the plantation South and other regions of the United States. Isolating issues of male secrecy, shame, and honor inherent in the Essex affair, the chapter explores issues in the slave narratives of black men who documented their social consumption and looks at the widespread nineteenth-century concern over whether the United States was becoming a cannibal nation.