Richard Beale Davis Prize, 2015

Among the many outstanding essays published in Early American Literature in 2015, Kristina Garvin’s “Corporate Ties: Arthur Mervyn’s Serial Economics” stands out as one of the two most innovative and as such is the co-winner of the Richard Beale Davis Prize for best essay printed in Early American Literature for that year. In “Corporate Ties” (50.3), Garvin deftly evinces how Charles Brockden Brown deploys seriality as both a thematic and a compositional concern within Arthur Mervyn. While most critics gloss over the text’s original incomplete serial publication in favor of classifying it simply as a novel, Garvin foregrounds Brown’s subtle figurations of the complexities of seriality—as both a means of publication and as a narrative style—to define and structure his concerns with risk, speculation, and certainty. In so doing, her essay highlights how the intricacies and uncertainties of post-Revolutionary magazine publication produced a new relationship between authors and readers, one defined in many ways by a continual postponement of conclusion. By attending to how seriality creates a prolonged temporal relationship between consumers and producers, Garvin situates the unfolding of Arthur Mervyn alongside shifts in post-Revolutionary economic practices increasingly designed “to extend credit and pool risk” so as to safeguard investors against market fluctuations. For Garvin, Brown’s figuration of Mervyn’s own serial reinvention of himself embodies a “self-consciously” serial practice that “displaces immediate fulfillment in favor of continued deferral.” In so doing, Garvin exhibits how Brown maps an economic system built upon capitalizing inevitable deferrals onto issues of form and content in an effort to fashion a text that accurately registers a market system designed to mitigate the potential losses of speculation by establishing “financial mastery over the future.” By linking questions of publication history, seriality, economics, and style, Garvin has produced a generative model for the field to rethink its attachment to the primacy of the novel form, and her essay will appeal to readers with a wide range of interests.

In “Mary Howard’s Mark: Children’s Literature and the Scales of Reading the Pacific” (50.3), Richard Beale Davis Prize co-winner Melissa Gniadek takes up a virtually unknown, anonymously authored children’s book, The Little but Affecting History of Mary Howard, published in 1836 by a New Hampshire press. At four inches high and sixteen pages, this chapbook is quantitatively small. What’s more, it seems but a minor work given that it’s a children’s book that stitches together clichés about good God-loving girls who are kind to animals and submissive to fate, even if fate swerves from English girlhood into a captivity narrative when the book’s protagonist is kidnapped and tattooed by a Maori chief. Analyzing this diminutive text whose extant copies are scattered across the East Coast of North America and the South Pacific, Gniadek expands the scope and scale of early American literary studies by orienting the field to still understudied Pacific problems and archives, all the while elaborating on the field’s long-standing concern with race, imperialism, and book history. Gniadek tracks how this chapbook’s bundle of clichés about girlhood, white domesticity, and both of their interruption by the markings of people of color participated in the cultural patternings that sustained colonialisms. Yet the young protagonist’s marking by tattoos introduces a system of marking and meaning that cannot be entirely grasped by either the book’s characters or its readers and is, for this reason, fundamentally different from the Roman alphabet whose mastery the children’s book makes possible. Riffing on the work of Samuel Otter and Geoffrey Sanborn, Gniadek argues that the marks of tattoos evoke sexual and racial penetrations that Anglo-European persons actually or imaginatively moving through the Pacific disavowed yet also desired. That this motif of disavowal and desire circulates in a children’s book makes clear that early nineteenth-century girlhood is traversed by the desires and transgressions of both adults and children. Moreover, Gniadek’s savvy analysis charts a less masculinist and monumentalizing literary history of...