American, 18th Century and Early American Literature

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.

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. The Grand Chorus of Complaint 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, Everton 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.

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.