American, 19th Century Literature

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.

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.

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.

“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

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.

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.

This book gathers together original essays dealing with Herman Melville's relations with his historical era, with class, with the marketplace, with ethnic cosmopolitanism, and with religion. These essays are framed by a new, short biography, an introduction, an illustrated chronology, and a bibliographical essay. Taken together, these pieces afford a fresh and searching set of perspectives on Melville's connections both with his own age and also with our own. This book makes the case, as does no other collection of criticism of its size, for Melville's commanding centrality to nineteenth-century American literature.

This book argues that in the unprecedented globalizing, multi‐diasporic dynamics of our moment, what we have long thought of as “ethnic literature” is becoming “interethnic literature.” While ethnic American literatures still honor particular peoples' histories and traditions, the plots, characters, structures, and literary influences of post‐1980 ethnic fiction are compelled by an urge to encounter with others. Presenting interethnicity as paradigm and critical model, this book takes contemporary Asian American fiction as its case study. The Preface and Chapter 1 theorize interethnicity with reference to anthropological, postcolonial, and transnational theories of human migration and encounter; position this argument within the debates of Asian Americanist critique; and survey interethnic trends and tropes in a wide range of contemporary Asian American fiction. Three chapters present extended readings of interethnic experimentation in contemporary Asian American novels: Chapter 2 discusses the ambivalent relationship of Chang‐rae Lee's Native Speaker to African Americans, as well as to Koreanness, whiteness, and the multicultural, urban masses; Chapter 3 examines Gish Jen's elaboration of a transformational Chinese American identity in the heroine's conversion to Judaism in Mona in the Promised Land; and Chapter 4 argues that Karen Tei Yamashita demonstrates the convergence of interethnic and transnational imaginaries in a U.S.‐Mexico border region novel, Tropic of Orange. Two interchapters develop in‐between subjects: Asian American fiction's encounters with African Americans and their culture, and the cross‐ethnic writing of Jewishness in contemporary fictions by Asian Americans and others. The epilogue treats the historical development of mixed‐race characters in Asian American fiction.