Early-19th-Century Literature

This year has produced an unusual number of innovative, full-scale period studies that variously enlarge and complicate our understanding of American literature during the half-century between 1815 and 1865. Most explore projects or problems in which literary works (among other cultural forms) exemplify the sociological, political, and historical forces shaping antebellum America. Several deploy provocative new models of intertextuality, though in most cultural critique has altogether supplanted textual analysis as the compelling critical objective. One feels increasingly obliged to add the phrase "and culture" to this chapter's title. Jürgen Habermas's social theory informs several books and articles that gauge the emerging "public sphere" in the early Republic. Transnationalism bids to become the new orthodoxy; some exponents grant the ineluctability of national formations while others urge a post national progressivism. As interest in broad cultural topics waxes, attention to certain individual authors has waned. Poe still attracts more critical and scholarly discussion than any other writer surveyed here, and the surge of interest in African American women writers seems conspicuous, while work on Stowe shows a slight decline from last year's spike in activity, and studies of such once-popular authors as Irving and Longfellow have, it seems, all but ceased.

i Period Studies

Easily the most recondite new book is Arthur Versluis's Esoteric Origins, which documents the influence of alchemy, theosophy, Swedenborgianism, Rosicrucianism, and Freemasonry on a handful of canonical figures. Versluis insists that alongside the Enlightenment rationalism of the early Republic, esotericism flourished and informed such popular practices as spiritualism and mesmerism. In addition to chapters on Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, Emerson, Fuller, Whitman, Dickinson, and Bronson Alcott, with an English theosophist named J. P. Greaves oddly slipped into the mix, Versluis discusses the unlikely figure of Ethan Allen Hitchcock, an "independent Hermetic thinker" and admirer of Swedenborg (as well as Emerson) who during the Civil War served as Lincoln's military adviser. Hitchcock briefly taught Poe at West Point, though that connection yields no new insights on Poe's esoteric interests, gauged by Versluis to be skeptical and superficial. "Often enough," he concludes equivocally, "Poe's inspiration was Western esotericism," though he used these sources "only as points of inspiration and as means for effect" and "did not believe in them." Versluis more convincingly documents the assimilation of arcane knowledge and mysticism in Hawthorne and Emerson and amid recurrent self-citation concludes that the American Renaissance witnessed the "intellectualization" and "Americanization" and even "imaginization" of esotericism, which proves in the end an incongruous mélange of practices, mostly sealed off (in this account) from social and political controversy.

Precisely the opposite strategy informs Russ Castronovo's far-reaching study, Necro Citizenship, which draws on Habermas (as well as Louis Althusser and Marx) to anatomize the fetishizing of death in antebellum culture as a symptom of the political death-in-life induced by the disembodied ideals of U.S. democracy. Castronovo notes the equivalence of liberty and death in narratives by Lunsford Lane, William Wells Brown, Henry Bibb, and Frederick Douglass to exemplify both the social death of slavery and the need to "think against freedom" to imagine an alternative to "depoliticized" citizenship. He discusses reformist strategies for containing white male sexuality (as popularized by Sylvester Graham) in relation to the vice of slaveholding and reads midcentury esotericism such as mesmerism and spiritualism (briefly noted in Poe and Stowe and explored in detail in Hawthorne's Blithedale) as enactments of the disembodied passivity of white women. Ingeniously, Castronovo juxtaposes readings of Douglass's The Heroic Slave and Jacobs's Incidents against contemporary séances and spirit-rapping to suggest that "in popular discourses of the white unconscious, elements of African mysticism retained by diasporic black populations resurfaced in antipolitical forms." The closing chapter moves to the later 19th century, foregrounding Frances Harper's Iola Leroy as an "allegory of citizenship." At times rhetorically daunting, Castronovo's critique of the nationalist ideology of freedom nonetheless suggests new approaches to many authors and texts not considered in this alluring autopsy of the national body public.

Cultural nation-building receives a different...