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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.

This book recovers a major nineteenth-century literary figure, the American Claimant. The claimant was used to imagine cultural contact and exchange across the anglophone Atlantic, especially between Britain and the United States. Later, claimants were exported to South Africa, in fictions representing black students who acquired American degrees. The book argues that the claimant was a major and pervasive motif, with literary, rhetorical, and political uses. It was invoked to imagine cultural difference, in relation to identity, inheritance, relationship, or time. It could dramatize tensions between tradition and change, or questions of exclusion and power: it was wielded against slavery and segregation, or privileges of gender and class. American Claimants explores the figure’s implications for writers and editors, and also for missionaries, artists, and students, in works created and set in Britain, in the United States, in South Africa, and in Rome. The book touches on theatre history and periodical studies, literary marketing and reprinting, and activism, education, sculpture, fashion, and dress reform. Texts discussed range from Our American Cousin to Bleak House, Little Lord Fauntleroy to Frederick Douglass’ Paper; writers include Frances Trollope, Julia Griffiths, Alexander Crummell, John Dube, James McCune Smith, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Mark Twain.

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.

Not about Haiti but about the haunting power of its revolution, The Archive of Fear explores the traumatic force field that continued to inflect U.S. discussions of slavery and abolition both before and after the Civil War, sometimes with surprising intensity and endurance. Focusing on U.S. slavery and its aftermath in the nineteenth century, it challenges the long-assumed distinction between psychological and cultural-historical theories of trauma, discovering a virtual dialogue between three central U.S. writers and Sigmund Freud concerning the traumatic response of slavery’s perpetrators. To do so, it shows how trauma theory before Freud first involves a return to an overlap between crisis, insurrection, and mesmerism found in the work of Frederick Douglass, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and W. E. B. Du Bois. Mesmer’s “crisis state” has long been read as the precursor to hypnosis, the tool Freud famously rejected when he created psychoanalysis. But the story of what was lost to trauma theory when Freud adopted the “talk cure” can be told through cultural disruptions of New World slavery, especially after mesmerism arrived in Saint Domingue where its implication in the Haitian revolution in both reality and fantasy had an impact on the history of emancipation in the United States. The Archive of Fear argues that a strain of trauma theory and practice comes alive in the temporal and spatial disruptions of New World slavery—and that key elements of that theory still inform the infrastructure of race relations today. Reviewing trauma theory through its pre-Freudian roots—especially as the alarm of slavery’s perpetrators relates to the temporal patterns of Mesmer’s “crisis state”—widens our sense of the affective atmospheres through which emancipation had to be sought. And it illuminates the fugitive approach Douglass, Stowe, and Du Bois devised to confront and defuse the archive of fear still blocking full emancipation today.

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.

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.

This study explores Walt Whitman’s contradictory response to and embrace of several great prior British poets: Shakespeare, Milton, Burns, Blake, and Wordworth (with shorter essays on Scott, Carlyle, Tennyson, Wilde, and Swinburne). Through reference to his entire oeuvre, his published literary criticism, and his private conversations, letters, and manuscripts, this book seeks to understand the extent to which Whitman experienced the anxiety of influence as he sought to establish himself as America’s poet-prophet or bard (and the extent to which he sought to conceal such influence). An attempt is also made to lay out the often profound aesthetic, cultural, political, and philosophical affinities Whitman shared with these predecessors. In addition, this analysis focuses on all of Whitman’s extant comments on these iconic authors. Because Whitman was a deeply autobiographical writer, attention is also paid to how his comments on other poets reflect on his image of himself and on the ways he shaped his public image. Finally, there is contemplation as to how Whitman’s attitudes toward his British forerunners changed over the nearly fifty years of his active career.

Through close attention to Dickinson’s literal process of making—to both the material objects and compositional practices she employed in this process—this book takes up the project of analyzing how knowledge of Dickinson’s process can shape the way we read her poetry. It follows Dickinson through the five main stages of her career: copying poems onto folded sheets of stationery; inserting and embedding poems into correspondence; sewing sheets together to make fascicles; scattering loose sheets; and copying lines on often torn and discarded pieces of household paper. Describing these stages and contextualizing them within the materials and conventions of nineteenth-century culture reveals a poetics at work in Dickinson’s writing that is different from those regularly narrated by literary history. Rather than treating her as an elusive poetic genius whose poems we are simply left to interpret in a vacuum, this book makes Dickinson both more accessible and more complex by delving into the surprising and conventional methods she used to create her work. While reading Dickinson’s poetic project through the scenes and materials of poetic making offers a far more expansive vision of her writing than we currently witness, the book does not only produce new ways of reading Dickinson. It also advocates for a critical methodology that brings together the study of manuscripts, composition, and material culture for a new consideration of nineteenth-century poetry more broadly.

Moby-Dick looms large—gargantuan in size, themes, symbols, and influence. Its deep dives, comedic interludes, adventurous journey, and surface effects demand a new approach. Instead of a traditional academic analysis, this book grapples in novel fashion with this classic work. The book follows the flow of the original Moby-Dick and aims to bring new appreciation for the novel, its characters, and its readers. It captures the up and down history of the novel, from its original reception to its resurrection in the 1890s, to its becoming the central work in the canon of American literature in the 1930s. Great books such as Moby-Dick live outside the confines of libraries. They occupy a central place in popular culture. This book tracks the novel as it appears in various motion pictures (more than five major ones to date), comic routines and jokes, paintings, novels, songs (from rock to classical to rap), and in other cultural forms. In the process, the volume charts how, and why, this novel about a whale and its pursuer has captivated generations of American readers. And why it continues to do so today.

“Downwardly Mobile” explores the links between a growing sense of economic precariousness within the American middle class and the development of literary realism over the course of the nineteenth century by Rose Terry Cooke, Rebecca Harding Davis, William Dean Howells, Henry James, and Hamlin Garland. The book argues that, in each of these writers, the opacity and abstraction of social relationships in an expanding market economy combined with a sense of pervasive insecurity to produce a “hunger for the real” – a commitment to a mimetic literature capable of stabilizing the social world by capturing it with a new sharpness and accuracy. The book relocates the origins of literary realism in the antebellum period and a structure of feeling based in the residual household economy which prized the virtues of the local, the particular, and the concrete, against the alienating abstractions of the emerging market. In a parallel line of argument, the book explores the ways in which sympathetic identification with lower-class figures served to locate American realist authors in a confused and shifting social space. downward mobility

Emerson’s Memory Loss is about an archive of texts documenting Emerson’s intellectual state during the final phase of his life, as he underwent dementia. It is also about the way these texts provoke a rereading of the more familiar canon of Emerson’s thinking. Emerson’s memory loss, Hanlon argues, contributed to the shaping of a line of thought in America that emphasizes the social over the solipsistic, the affective over the distant, the many over the one. Emerson regarded his output during the time when his patterns of cognition transformed profoundly as a regathering of focus on the nature of memory and of thinking itself. His late texts theorize Emerson’s experience of senescence even as they disrupt his prior valorizations of the independent mind teeming with self-sufficient conviction. But still, these late writings have succumbed to a process of critical forgetting—either ignored by scholars or denied inclusion in Emerson’s oeuvre. Attending to a manuscript archive that reveals the extent to which Emerson collaborated with others—especially his daughter, Ellen Tucker Emerson—to articulate what he considered his most important work even as his ability to do so independently waned, Hanlon measures the resonance of these late texts across the stretch of Emerson’s thinking, including his writing about Margaret Fuller and his meditations on streams of thought that verge unto those of his godson, William James. Such ventures bring us toward a self defined less by its anxiety of overinfluence than by its communality, its very connectedness with myriad others.

American pragmatism is premised on the notion that to find out what something is, look to fruits rather than roots. But the thought of the classical pragmatists is itself the fruit, this book argues, of earlier literary experiments in American literature. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, and (contemporaneously with the flowering of pragmatism) Henry James, each in their different ways prefigure at the level of literary form what emerge as the guiding ideas of classical pragmatism. Specifically, this link occurs in the way an experimental approach to composition informs the classical pragmatists' guiding and central idea that experience is not a matter of correspondence but of an ongoing attunement to the process. The link between experience and experiment is thus a way of gauging the deeper intellectual history by which literary experiments such as Emerson's Essays, Poe's invention of the detective story in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” Melville's strange follow-up to Moby-Dick, Pierre, and Henry James's late style, find their philosophical expression in some of the guiding ideas of classical pragmatism: Charles Peirce's notion of the ,“ abductive,” inference; William James's notion of “Radical empiricism,” and John Dewey's naturalist account of experience. The book frames this set of claims in relation to more contemporary debates within literary criticism and philosophy that have so far not been taken up in this context: putting Richard Poirier's account of the relation of pragmatism to literature into dialogue with Stanley Cavell's inheritance of Emerson as someone decidedly not a ,“ pragmatist,”; to the differences between classical pragmatists like William James and John Dewey and more recent, post-linguistic turn thinkers like Richard Rorty and Robert Brandom.

This book analyzes the legal and economic conflicts that occurred when nineteenth-century ideals of family collided with the realities of interracial intimacy. Counterposing nuanced literary interpretations with significant law cases, the book reveals a shared preoccupation with the financial quandaries emerging from cross-racial sexual encounters. The book moves us well beyond scholarship’s usual emphasis on racial identity’s ambiguities, demonstrating instead how interracial intimacy forced confrontations over who counted as family and who had legal access to family money. At stake were the very notion of kinship and the distribution of wealth in the United States. This book explores the histories of formerly enslaved women who tried to claim inheritances left to them by deceased owners, the household traumas of mixed-race slaves, post-Emancipation calls for reparations, and the economic fallout from antimiscegenation marriage laws. Authors including Nathaniel Hawthorne, Frank Webb, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Charles Chesnutt, and Lydia Maria Child recognized that intimate interracial relationships took myriad forms, often simultaneously—sexual, marital, coercive, familial, pleasurable, and painful. Their fiction confirms that the consequences of these relationships for nineteenth-century Americans meant thinking about more than the legal structure of racial identity. Who could count as family (and when), who could own property (and when), and how racial difference was imagined (and why) were emphatically bound together.

Even as Black Lives Matter thinkers underscore white supremacy’s manifestation in the unremarkable and all-too-often unnoticed unfolding of ordinary life, literary critical methods remain impeded by longstanding biases toward unconventional texts, visionary writers, and nonconforming ideas. The result is that we’re left without adequate methods, vocabularies, and archives for apprehending white supremacy’s urgent ordinariness. In Genre and White Supremacy in the Postemancipation United States, Travis M. Foster suggests that genre provides the best route out of this impasse. Through rigorous new interpretations of four popular literary and cultural genres—campus novels, the Ladies’ Home Journal, Civil War elegies, and gospel sermons—Foster unpacks how conventionality played a crucial role in both reconstituting and resisting taken-for-granted operations of white supremacy and antiblackness in the wake of emancipation. Arguing that genre provides a scale and a method for rendering ordinariness newly available to close analysis, Foster reveals the specific conventions and strategies through which antiblackness constitutes white social worlds far removed from the color line, while also surveying whiteness’s remarkable capacity to adapt itself to new conditions and incorporate internal differences. Simultaneously, using genre analysis to trace forms of black resistance that manifest within the radical collectivity of black social worlds, rather than through more familiar liberal politics of dissent, he highlights practices of freedom and community that refuse the very political conditions proffered by white supremacist logic. The result is an original and important new account of popular literature’s role in refashioning and resisting white supremacy in an emergent postemancipation climate.

Mark Twain called it “pious hypocrisies.” President McKinley called it “civilizing and Christianizing.” Both were referring to the US annexation of the Philippines in 1899. Drawing on documents ranging from Noah Webster's 1832 History of the United States through Congressional speeches and newspaper articles, and the anti-imperialist writings of Mark Twain, this book assesses the attitudes of Americans and the moralistic rhetoric that governed national and international debates over America's global mission at the turn into the twentieth century. It offers a reading both of the debates' religious framework and of the evolution of Christian national identity within the US It also moves outside US geopolitical boundaries, reviewing responses to the Americans' venture into global imperialism among Europeans, Latin Americans, and Filipinos.