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American Fragments
Between the independence of the colonies and the start of the Jacksonian age, American readers consumed an enormous number of literary texts called "fragments."American Fragments argues that this archive of deliberately unfinished writing reimagined the place of marginalized individuals in a country that was itself still unfinished.
The Part and the Whole in Early American Literature, Print Culture, and Art
The essays in this pathbreaking collection consider the significance of varied early American fragmentary genres and practices—from diaries and poetry, to almanacs and commonplace books, to sermons and lists, to Indigenous ruins and other material shards and fragments—often overlooked by critics in a scholarly privileging of the “whole.” Contributors from literary studies, book history, and visual culture discuss a host of canonical and non-canonical figures, from Edward Taylor and Washington Irving to Mary Rowlandson and Sarah Kemble Knight, offering insight into the many intellectual, ideological, and material variations of “form” that populated the early American cultural landscape. As these essays reveal, the casting of the fragmentary as aesthetically eccentric or incomplete was a way of reckoning with concerns about the related fragmentation of nation, society, and self. For a contemporary audience, they offer new ways to think about the inevitable gaps and absences in our cultural and historical archive.
The Haitian Revolution in the Early Republic of Letters
Concerns about Haiti suffused the early American print public sphere from the outbreak of the revolution in 1791 until well after its conclusion in 1804. The gothic, sentimental, and sensationalist undertones of openly speculative periodical accounts were accelerated within the genre of fiction, where the specter of Haiti was a commonplace trope. Haiti was not an enigma occasionally deployed by American writers, but rather the overt bellwether against which the prospects for national futurity were imagined and interrogated. Ideological representations of Haiti infected the imaginations of early American readers in ways that have yet to be accounted for in American literary history. Unfortuna...
Feeling Singular
Feeling Singular reconceives the Early Republic period of the United States by presenting the forgotten and queer stories of a series of marginal, even eccentric figures in the republican United States. Through closely reading a range of texts--from manuscripts to hastily printed books, and from phonetically spelled pamphlets to sexually explicit broadsides--Bascom uses the language of queer studies to understand what made someone singular in the early United States and how that singularity points at the ruptures in social codes that get normalized through historical analysis.
Consuming Anxieties
Writers of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries—a period of vast economic change—recognized that the global trade in alcohol and tobacco promised a brighter financial future for England, even as overindulgence at home posed serious moral pitfalls. This engaging and original study explores how literary satirists represented these consumables—and related anxieties about the changing nature of Britishness—in their work. Riley traces the satirical treatment of wine, beer, ale, gin, pipe tobacco, and snuff from the beginning of Charles II’s reign, through the boom in tobacco’s popularity, to the end of the Gin Craze in libertine poems and plays, anonymous verse, ballad operas, and the satire of canonical writers such as Gay, Pope, and Swift. Focusing on social concerns about class, race, and gender, Consuming Anxieties examines how satirists championed Britain’s economic strength on the world stage while critiquing the effects of consumable luxuries on the British body and consciousness.
Refiguring Speech
In this book, Amy R. Wong unravels the colonial and racial logic behind seemingly innocuous assumptions about "speech": that our words belong to us, and that self-possession is a virtue. Through readings of late-Victorian fictions of empire, Wong revisits the scene of speech's ideological foreclosures as articulated in postcolonial theory. Engaging Afro-Caribbean thinkers like Édouard Glissant and Sylvia Wynter, Refiguring Speech reroutes attention away from speech and toward an anticolonial poetics of talk, which emphasizes communal ownership and embeddedness within the social world and material environment. Analyzing novels by Robert Louis Stevenson, Bram Stoker, George Meredith, Joseph C...
Transamerican Sentimentalism and Nineteenth Century US Literary History
Sentimentalism is usually studied through US-British relations after the American Revolution or in connection to national reforms like the abolitionist movement. Transamerican Sentimentalism and Nineteenth-Century US Literary History instead argues that African American, Native American, Latinx, and Anglo American women writers also used sentimentalism to construct narratives that reframed or countered the violence dominating the nineteenth-century Americas, including the Haitian Revolution, Indian Removal, the US-Mexican War, and Cuba's independence wars. By tracking the transformation of sentimentalism as the US reacted to, enacted, and intervened in conflict Transamerican Sentimentalism a...
Health and Sickness in the Early American Novel
This book is a study of depictions of health and sickness in the early American novel, 1787-1808. These texts reveal a troubling tension between the impulse toward social affection that built cohesion in the nation and the pursuit of self-interest that was considered central to the emerging liberalism of the new Republic. Good health is depicted as an extremely positive social value, almost an a priori condition of membership in the community. Characters who have the “glow of health” tend to enjoy wealth and prestige; those who become sick are burdened by poverty and debt or have made bad decisions that have jeopardized their status. Bodies that waste away, faint, or literally disappear off of the pages of America’s first fiction are resisting the conditions that ail them; as they plead for their right to exist, they draw attention to the injustice, apathy, and greed that afflict them.
The American School of Empire
This book explores how the idea of empire shaped the culture and politics of the United States from its foundation.
