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Reviewed by:
  • Unsettled States: Nineteenth-Century American Literary Studies ed. by Dana Luciano and Ivy G. Wilson
  • Murat Goc
UNSETTLED STATES: Nineteenth-Century American Literary Studies. Edited by Dana Luciano and Ivy G. Wilson. New York: New York University Press. 2014.

Unsettled States: Nineteenth-Century American Literary Studies sheds light on the papers long swept under the rug ranging from early Hispanic literature to polar periodicals. More importantly, the authors of the articles conscientiously build their discussions in [End Page 175] relation to contemporary literature and critical theory, which makes the collection even more distinguishing and valuable for the twenty-first century reader. Dana Luciano, one of two editors of the book, explains the motivation behind unsettling the literary canons and paradigm-shifting in literary studies that delineates the topographical and ontological “fault lines.” Luciano distinguishes this collection from others in that it is not a literary critique of minoritarian texts but rather a work in progress, “improvisional and speculative.” Luciano suggests that the book was designed in the format of a conference that never really took place “in an effort to replicate the sense of conversation” (13). The articles in these three chapters (or sessions) are further supported with a commentary article at the end of each chapter by Shelley Streeby, Jonathan Elmer, and Peter Coviello, respectively, and a final wrap-up by Ivy G. Wilson.

The first chapter, “Archives Unbound,” centrally discusses the idea of literary archives and canon formation. Rodrigo Lazo in his “Confederates in the Hispanic Attic” emphasizes that literary archives, and particularly the history of Hispanic literature, can (and should) go beyond the history of minority groups since they “lead to unexpected discoveries and even uncomfortable histories” (34). Lazo investigates the possibility and/or subjectivity of a “Hispanic archive” and expands his discussion across the boundaries of the nineteenth-century literature attaching strings to Annie Proulx’s now famous Brokeback Mountain to blow the invisibility of Hispanics in the States wide open. Lloyd Pratt, in his “Historical Totality and the Archive,” extends the discussion of literary archives onto a racial ground and asks “what an efficacious black history would look like and what would be its defining characteristics” (57). Drawing upon Edward P. Jones’s novel The Known World (2003), Pratt discusses how African American historical fiction specifies a theory of historiography excluding all forms of “oral, vernacular, and commemorative culture” (62). “Race, Reenactment, and the ‘Natural-Born Citizen’” by Tavia Nyong’o employs a Marxist historical reading of the Civil War and race issues, which he interprets through a Foucaldian genealogy of the Constitution and chrononormativity that “allows both history and our understanding of it to progress smoothly toward a complacent future, and paradoxically positioning history against the backward looking, thinking, and feeling” (82).

The second chapter “States of Exception,” begins with David Kazanjian’s “Unsettled Life: Early Liberia’s Epistolary Equivocations.” He presents the correspondences of two major black figures, Phillis Wheatley and Olaudah Equiano, and investigates the meaning of “homecoming.” Hester Blum, in “The News at the Ends of the Earth: Polar Periodicals,” states her interest “in the collective, confined literary culture of late nineteenth century working men at the scene of labor” (162). She discusses why we produce literature and how literature binds us together, even in an ice-stranded polar expedition team. Glenn Heddler’s “Feeling Like a State: Writing the 1863 New York City Draft Riots” unveils a historical tragedy from the perspectives of three writers, Anna Elizabeth Dickinson, Herman Melville, and Edmund Ruffin, who, despite their differing political ideas and literary styles, agreed upon “the depiction of antistate violence as an outburst of public sentiment, as if a riot were an enactment of a social emotion” (192).

A loosely attached third chapter, “Speculative Sexualities,” focuses on body politics and masturbation in the nineteenth century. In “Eat, Sex, and Race,” Kyla W. Tompkins analyzes Sylvester Graham’s text A Lecture to Young Men on Chastity to look into “the political life and erotic history of mouth in the nineteenth century United States” (246). Graham’s remedies for the “epidemic of masturbation” impose “medical and psychiatric discourses of wellness and the emergence of nation state” which posits an “economic and...

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