Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture

When we understand our histories and identities in terms of the transnational forces that shaped our nationalist frameworks, we discover substantial precedent for North American identities and cultural spaces. During and immediately after the War of 1848, U.S. and Mexican liberal nationalists unsuccessfully crafted trans­ national identities in non-fiction essays and editorials. The historical overlap of Mexican and U.S. American New World liberalism, defined as it is by awkward and uneven parallelisms, modifies common assumptions about histories of liberal nationalism and national­identity formation. North American identities have arisen in strategic contexts defined by experiences of double-(un)consciousness, disjunction, fracture, and paradox.

Al entender nuestras historias e identidades en términos de fuerzas transnacionales que han constituido nuestros modelos nacionalistas, descubrimos un precedente importante respecto de las identidades norteame­ ricanas y los espacios culturales. Durante e inmediatamente después de la guerra de 1848, algunos liberales mexicanos y estadunidenses forjaron sin éxito identidades transnacionales en ensayos de no ficción y edito- riales. El traslape histórico del liberalismo del Nuevo Mundo de México y Estados Unidos, caracterizado por extraños y desiguales paralelismos, ha modificado los supuestos comunes sobre las historias del liberalismo nacionalista y la formación de identidades nacionales. En Norteamérica estas últimas surgieron en contextos estratégicos definidos por experiencias de doble (in)conciencia, disyunción, fractura y paradoja.

Offering a framework for uncovering the hidden meanings of political epithets, this article explains the potency of the term carpetbagger by exploring the material artifact that underpinned it.  Although they coined the term in 1867, southern Democrats were mobilizing the negative associations that carpetbags had acquired during the antebellum period, particularly as symbols of excessive mobility.  The sinister or suspect figure of the “man with the carpetbag” was a familiar figure on both sides of the Atlantic by the 1850s, appearing in news reports, fiction, plays, paintings, and cartoons, but also in Republican as well as Democratic political discourse.

Introduction to the definitive compilation of  19th-century American painter, George Caleb Bingham's (1811-1879) private and public letters dating from 1835 to 1879, edited by Lynn W. Gentzler and  published by The State Historical Society of Missouri and The Friends of Arrow Rock Inc. in 2011. The introduction comprises an overview of Bingham's life, providing the social, political, and cultural context for the annotated letters that follow.

Texte paru dans Tiphaine Larroque et Claire Le Thomas (sous la dir.), Voyages d'artistes des XIXe et XXe siècle. Continuités et ruptures (Strasbourg, Presses universitaires de Strasbourg, 2016).
Présenté à une journée d'études en 2011 et finalisé en 2013, cet article n'a pas pu bénéficier de la lecture de l'ouvrage de Melissa Dabakis, A Sisterhood of Sculptors. American Artists in Nineteenth-Century Rome (University Park (Penn), Pennsylvania State University Press, 2014) mais peut être comparé à l'approche de cette autrice. Il porte sur la sculptrice Harriet Hosmer, son réseau d'amitiés et d'influences, ses voies d'accès à la reconnaissance de son talent, sa vie sociale dans le milieu des expatriés anglophones de Rome, dans les dernières décennies du pouvoir temporel des papes.

This paper aims to discuss some rhetorical and pragmatic strategies that occur in the speeches of Native Americans as reported by nineteenth-century commentators. The materials under investigation range from reports in journals to speeches published in books. While such texts cannot of course be discussed as authentic materials strictu sensu, as speeches were transcribed, translated, and finally edited by Euro-American authors, they may nonetheless prove of great interest on account of their multiple significance: on the one hand commentators stress their validity and authenticity; on the other, they highlight the 'quaintness' of certain turns of phrases in the speeches they offer to their reading public, thus showing the (increasing) cultural distance of their subjects. 1

This course is designed as a study of an intellectual movement-not of an individual writer, literary genre, or historical period. Students should accordingly consider the very concept of an intellectual movement and how it might apply to different regions of historical inquiry. The course should foster discussion about essays and memoirs (what we might now call "creative nonfiction") in appreciation of their rich complexities-that is, without reducing them to simple platitudes. One important result should be a strengthening of critical reading and writing skills.

This lesson plan is intended for teachers to use in Upper-level high school English courses such as AP Literature.  May be modified to suit.  Contains links for possible further research projects by a student on topics raised by this story, which was originally published in 1895 in a Montreal newspaper, then collected in Sin Far's Mrs. Spring Fragrance (Chicago, 1912). 

Created under my supervision by a student; published with her permission.

This essay focuses on a specific aspect of electric telegraphy in America-what I call 'telegraphic acoustics', which includes: 1) the sound of telegraph wires vibrating overhead and 2) 'sound-reading', the practice of transcribing Morse code by ear instead of transcribing it from a printout. Telegraphic acoustics started as a distinctively American technical evolution that emphasized sound and listening over sight and literacy. Because of this emphasis and because of increasingly universal poetic education, American telegraphers understood their technology in poetic terms. In turn, American poets, including John Greenleaf Whittier and Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., also thought about poetry in terms of telegraphic acoustics. The essay focuses on Emily Dickinson as an in-depth case study because of her unusual familiarity with telegraphic acoustics in Amherst; her visual impairment, which heightened her awareness of sound; and her insights into the nature and future of networks and information flow. It concludes by examining the intersection of her poetry and telephony, which was perceived as an extension of telegraphy. I argue that thinking of these media acoustically, instead of in terms of literacy, reveals a rich separate discourse running through Dickinson's poetry and American poetry generally. This discourse demands reinterpretations of several ca-nonical Dickinson poems.

Friedrich Nietzsche, Mark Twain, and Joseph Conrad all came to the same conclusion at roughly the same time: that a discourse of morality, rather than promoting the social good, actually sets the stage for human rights abuses.  In this essay, I show how Twain replaces morality with a discourse of intimacy in his novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalysis is similar to Hegel’s philosophy. Both place great emphasis on the notion of recognition. It is in the process of acquiring recognition from the ‘other’ either as an object or a subject that the self gains knowledge.

However, Lacan emphasised the importance of language for self-knowledge. Language constructs reality through the use of signifiers and the signified. A signifier is a word and what it signifies is a concept.

The problems posed by language are many. The poetry of Emily Dickinson highlights many of these problems. She also illustrates the philosophical and psychoanalytical fragmentation of the self.

Travail d'Initiation à la Recherche  en Littérature (L2 Etudes Anglophones). Nous devions choisir une nouvelle d'Edgar Allan Poe et proposer un angle d'attaque pour l'analyser. Mon travail se focalise sur la manière dont Poe brouille la frontière entre culpabilité, folie et surnaturel dans ses nouvelles, en particulier dans le climax de the "Tell-Tale Heart". J'y explore également les possibilités d'adaptation filmique et les éventuels parallèles avec d'autres oeuvres littéraires. Novembre 2019.

Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire is now considered a groundbreaking work of fiction that humanizes the typically demonized and otherized image of vampires and assigns a sociocultural role of embodying moral and sexual ambiguities in contemporary America. Yet most consider Rice’s vampire characters as glamorous and stylistic modern flâneurs. Rejecting that general consideration, this essay aims to read the novel anew in light of its historical and geographical setting of late-eighteenth-century American South. The essay focuses on the consistently disregarded fact that the main character and first-person narrator Louis is originally a plantation owner in Louisiana, and examines his endeavor to achieve the absolute authority of that identity through his encounters with other vampires and humans. By exposing the futility of such endeavor, this essay ultimately sheds light on Rice’s intention of proposing a vampiric relationship as a productive and even necessary model of life in multicultural and multiracial America.

Tom Sawyer is one of those transcendent literary characters who go beyond the simply iconic and enter the realm of myth. His statue stands alongside his best friend, Huckleberry Finn, in Mark Twain’s childhood home, Hannibal, Missouri (erected in 1926, it’s one of the first, if not the first, statues of a non-religious fictional character), and together these larger-than-life figures tower over the development of the modern American novel. He’s been portrayed in 25 films and TV shows to date (the last as recently as 2016), and when the producers of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen wanted an American fictional icon to join Alan Moore’s pantheon of British literary heroes, he was the instant and obvious choice. Then there are the plays, the comics, the videogames, the musicals, and, even, the ballet… 

For boys, especially, he’s the hero of the book you read and loved as a kid because your dad recommended it, as his probably had before him. (Mine certainly did.) And you might have started out wondering what a novel set in the American South of the 1840s could possibly have to do with your life, until you started to read and were instantly drawn in. This is because, at heart, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is a celebration of childhood – well, boyhood – and that’s a universal human experience, whenever and wherever it happens. You can read it as a kid and identify with Tom and Huck, Sid, Mary, Becky Thatcher and the rest of the gang. You can read it again as a parent and see your own children in them: the elaborate imaginative play, the fluid, capricious allegiances, the hilariously half-understood adult world, the crushing and instantly forgotten heartbreaks, the vital trivia, and, above all, the anarchy. Maybe he’s been supplanted by Harry Potter these days, but it should be remembered that they’d likely be no Harry without Tom.

In Supernatural Entertainments, Simone Natale vividly depicts spiritualism’s rise as a religious and cultural phenomenon and explores its strong connection to the growth of the media entertainment industry in the nineteenth century. He frames the spiritualist movement as part of a new commodity culture that changed how public entertainments were produced and consumed.

Starting with the story of the Fox sisters, considered the first spiritualist mediums in history, Natale follows the trajectory of spiritualism in Great Britain and the United States from its foundation in 1848 to the beginning of the twentieth century. He demonstrates that spiritualist mediums and leaders adopted many of the promotional strategies and spectacular techniques that were being developed for the broader entertainment industry. Spiritualist mediums were indistinguishable from other professional performers, as they had managers and agents, advertised in the press, and used spectacularism to draw audiences.

Addressing the overlap between spiritualism’s explosion and nineteenth-century show business, Natale provides an archaeology of how the supernatural became a powerful force in the media and popular culture of today.

Reviews:

“Approaching Victorian supernaturalism as popular spectacle, Natale makes a compelling argument that nineteenth-century spiritualism made a significant contribution to what would become the dominant religion of the twentieth century: the entertainment industry. Rather than seeing the spiritualists and their energetic followers as gullible or deluded, Natale explores the more fascinating possibility that medium, circle, and audience helped redefine the possibilities of domestic leisure and public performance.”
—Jeffrey Sconce, Northwestern University

“We all know that the supernatural is entertaining. Just turn on your television set or go to the movies. But this entertaining? Supernatural Entertainments is one of the most original books I have read in a long time. Simone Natale’s embrace of the history of technology, celebrity studies, material culture, popular culture, photography, and film studies to plumb the immediate historical background of the modern supernatural also makes it astonishingly capacious and interdisciplinary. Get ready for a ride. Or a show.”
—Jeffrey J. Kripal, author of Mutants and Mystics: Science Fiction, Superhero Comics, and the Paranormal

"This is an ambitious, overdue book ... Natale depicts a more light-hearted version of Spiritualism than the politically and epistemically fraught social history that other authors have established. Such arguments are detailed, compelling, and themselves enchanting instances of media history."
—Susan Zieger, in Media History

In 1839, after a long chain of dead-end jobs necessitated by his outwardly prosperous but privately profligate father’s debt-ridden death seven years earlier, the 19-year-old Herman Melville did what many other disaffected and adventurous young men had done before him and ran away to sea. He signed aboard the merchantman St. Lawrence as a ship’s boy (the lowest ‘green hand’ rank), for a round trip from New York to the then vast trading port of Liverpool. Returning to New York in the autumn, he took a teaching position but left after one term because he never received any wages. After a trip up the Ohio River in an unsuccessful quest for employment and inspired by Richard Henry Dana’s nautical memoir Two Years Before the Mast (1840) and Jeremiah N. Reynolds’ 1839 article ‘Mocha Dick: Or The White Whale of the Pacific’ in the Knickerbocker magazine, Melville headed for New Bedford, Massachusetts, the ‘Whaling City’. There, he signed aboard the whaler Acushnet, again as a ‘green hand’, for a 1/175th share of the profits, setting sail at the beginning of January 1841. 

It was the custom of whaling vessels to ‘gam’ if their paths crossed in the open ocean, meaning that the captains and first mates would meet for drinks and to share intelligence on the movements of whales, while the crews also got together and swapped stories. The Acushnet regularly gammed with the Lima from Nantucket, whose company included William Henry Chase, the son of Owen Chase, who had been the first mate on the whaler Essex, sunk by an abnormally large sperm whale approximately 2,000 nautical miles west of South America in 1820:

I turned around and saw him about one hundred rods directly ahead of us, coming down with twice his ordinary speed of around 24 knots, and it appeared with tenfold fury and vengeance in his aspect. The surf flew in all directions about him with the continual violent thrashing of his tail. His head about half out of the water, and in that way he came upon us, and again struck the ship.

Chase had survived the appalling aftermath of the wreck, when the ship’s 20-man crew had spent three months at sea in three leaky whaling boats, eventually resorting to cannibalism, with survivors drawing lots to see who would be sacrificed and who would kill them after the corpses of the men who died of exposure ran out. (In another macabre twist, one boat carrying three men became separated from the group. It was found years later washed up on Ducie Island, an uninhabited atoll in the Pitcairn Islands, the skeletons of the crew still onboard.) Chase wrote an account of the ill-fated voyage in 1821, Narrative of the Most Extraordinary and Distressing Shipwreck of the Whale-Ship Essex, after which he returned to sea for another 19 years. Despite a distinguished seafaring career which saw him captain first the whaler Winslow and then his own ship, the Charles Carrol, Chase was haunted by his experiences. He spent eight years in an asylum after retiring, and when he died in Nantucket in 1869, he was found to have been hiding food in his attic. William lent Melville a copy of his father’s book, of which he would later write: ‘The reading of this wondrous story upon the landless sea, & close to the very latitude of the shipwreck had a surprising effect upon me.’

Imaginary dialogues had the advantage of emphasizing rationalism and removing argument from the realm of passion and violence.  While they were used often in both anti- and pro-slavery literature of the United States, along with other rhetorical genres they did no more than expose the fault lines in US society created by slavery.  These dialogues were polite addresses to slavery’s daily violence and could not resolve what required a civil war to end.  It was part of the reform literary culture to produce such set-pieces and this type of polite literature was part and parcel of what made much reform writing so ineffective, since it was a drawing-room rendition and philosophical abstraction of raw human experience under slavery.

En su poema La cautiva (1837), Esteban Echeverría figuró el territorio denominado “desierto” como una mujer cautiva. Este ensayo explora, por un lado, las diversas tradiciones que confluyeron en la imagen de la cautiva y su potencia alegórica (el mito de Lucía Miranda, Atala de Chateaubriand, entre otras), a la vez que busca recomponer la asimilación entre territorio (desierto) y género (mujer cautiva) en la producción del propio Echeverría. Por otro lado, elabora la hipótesis de que no puede pensarse la caída del poder alegórico de la cautiva sin releer, en el marco de la literatura gauchesca y su peculiaridad, la reelaboración de la figura de la cautiva en La vuelta de Martín Fierro (1879) de José Hernández.

Poe’s “The Man of the Crowd” illustrates the paranoia afflicting London’s urban populations in a period of mass immigration and urbanization. As the story begins, the narrator sits in a café observing people walk by. While classifying the mostly degenerate amalgamation of people into a taxonomized catalog, he identifies “a decrepid [sic] old man,” who immediately captures his attention, prompting a daylong pursuit. In the end, the narrator concludes that the man is “the type and genius of deep crime.” Criticism on this story often focuses on this flâneur, but when broadened to include the crowd, a “psychopathic crowd structure” is revealed. Similarly, Vicki Hester and Emily Seger’s analysis of Poe’s “The Black Cat” suggests that the narrator’s behavior is consistent with current forensic research on psychopathy. Yet, for “The Man of the Crowd,” Steven Fink identifies the flâneur as the author’s version of the legendary Wandering Jew. However, when readers juxtapose the evolutionary history of psychopathy from the nineteenth century to today, alongside the political and social conditions of the nineteenth-century crowd, the paranoia and fear embedded in modern city life reveals otherwise. A breeding ground of mass suspicion between individuals—beyond the narrator and old man—is a psychopathic crowd structure in which everyone is “a man of the crowd.” And despite psychology’s rapid evolution in the past century, the psychopath in our world remains nearly as elusive as in Poe’s.

Emma Donoghue has published a number of spectacular biographical novels. In this interview, she clarifies some of her objectives when writing a novel about an actual historical person. She also clarifies some of the distinctions between the historical and the biographical novel.

Reclaims public speaking as a central cultural form of the nineteenth century

Places famous speeches by Emmeline Pankhurst, Abraham Lincoln, Mark Twain and Oscar Wilde alongside previously unpublished texts
Offers a more racially, ethnically and politically varied range of speeches than ever collected before
Includes illustrations and suggestions for further readings
A ‘how to use this book’ section provides historical contextualisations and valuable guidance for steering classroom discussions
This pioneering collection brings alive the world of public speaking between the American Revolution and the age of the Suffragettes. It presents over seventy speeches by a diverse range of female and male activists, politicians, tribal leaders, fugitive slaves and preachers from both sides of the Atlantic, debating the crucial issues of the day, from socialism and imperialism to slavery and women’s suffrage. Complete with detailed notes, introductions, illustrations and suggestions for further reading, it provides a unique introduction to transatlantic history and culture.

Nuova versione riveduta e annotata di "Camminare". Include lunghi estratti dai saggi "Una passeggiata d'inverno" e "Notte e chiar di luna". Completa la raccolta una selezione di estratti, per lo più inediti, dai diari e dalle lettere. Con una introduzione del filosofo thoreauviano Leonardo Caffo e una "Nota del curatore".

“Black Power in the Kitchen” excavates African American women’s culinary writing, which has been relegated to the margins of the US and African American literary canon. This chapter provides an overview of key developments in the black female-authored cookbook from the nineteenth to the twentieth century. It examines early cookbooks that exploited the “Jemima Code” for their authors’ individual advancement, the community cookbook that served the larger goals of racial uplift, and the experimental and diasporic aesthetic of soul food writing. Authors under discussion include Malinda Russell, Abby Fisher, Freda DeKnight, and Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor, among others. What emerges from this account is a new understanding of how black feminist politics underwrites these literary texts, and opens up possibilities for understanding how these texts, in turn, bare on wider aesthetic practices in the United States – specifically, by reconfiguring the kitchen table as a writing table.

This article considers the letters of Anne Newport Royall, first female American journalist, and her sojourn in Moulton, Alabama in the early 1820s. Royall encountered a new denomination, the Cumberland Presbyterians, and a new word, "Covaulting." She documented her opinion of both, as she experienced them in outdoor revivals.

To pick up an American literature anthology is to pick up a political and educational tool.  Its editorial craftwork emerges against an ideological matrix that determines the basis of inclusion.  In constructing a representative literature anthology the possible set of exclusions is nearly limitless.  Instead, the genre demands a political consciousness of anthology editing that does not merely expand the table of contents but rather encourages reading practices that connect literatures with geopolitical histories and futures.

Winner of the Melville Society's annual Hennig Cohen award for "for the best article, book chapter, or essay in a book about Herman Melville" in 2017.

My argument unfolds in four parts. In the first, I establish the context of Melville’s Gothic intervention by examining representations of the Malay and related figures of the Manilla-man and Lascar in American periodicals of the antebellum years. I also highlight how prevailing accounts of Malay hostility tend to obscure or diminish histories of Western violence, a practice that problematizes their empirical pretensions. The second section, which begins with Mardi and “Benito Cereno” before moving to Moby-Dick, highlights Melville’s recurring deployment of these Malay-coded figures as threatening symbols
indispensable to his Pacific Gothic mode. In the third section, I analyze this mode’s full elaboration in Moby-Dick and articulate the future-oriented, biopolitical implications of its imaginary. In a brief conclusion, I examine Melville’s treatment of Manilla rope, a material object whose mutable aesthetics reaffirm the transformative power of the Pacific
Gothic as a technology of racialization and provide an opportunity to reconsider Moby-Dick’s significance in the longue durée of U.S. involvement in the Asia-Pacific region, a history punctuated by the colonization of the Philippines in 1898 and a series of military
interventions thereafter.

Uniform in their dullness [and] lack of inspiration, [James] Longacre's contributions to…regular coinages were a decided step backward from the art of [his predecessors]….Whatever his previous qualities as an engraver of portraits, he seems not to have brought much imagination to his important post at the Philadelphia Mint. 1

In recent years, the study of spiritualism and occultism has been proposed as a key to understand the political, social and cultural issues of nineteenth-century America. While the position of spiritualism's supporters has been the subject of most accounts, however, sources that critically questioned the spiritualist claims have been usually left aside. In this article, I will rely on this extremely rich body of sources, in order to understand how the debate about spiritualism played an essential role in the shaping of sceptical perspectives in nineteenth-century America. Focusing in particular on anti-spiritualist performances played on the stage by professional magicians and on psychological writings that questioned the phenomena of the spiritualist seances, I will argue that in both contexts the ‘spirit medium’ came to be understood as a performer, and the sitters as spectators. As a critical reading of texts such as film theory pioneer Hugo Münsterberg's 1891 ‘Psychology and Mysticism’ may suggest, the exposure of spiritualist trickery shaped a discourse on perception and sensorial delusion that anticipated in many ways later debates on cinematic spectatorship.