Pub Date : 2023-03-01DOI: 10.1353/jnc.2023.a909296
Marie Stango
Abstract: This article examines letters written by formerly enslaved settlers in Liberia during the mid-nineteenth century to examine two aspects of the afterlives of slavery. Manumitted settlers in Liberia, as formerly enslaved people, connected to audiences in the United States in different ways from freeborn settlers, who were more likely to make multiple transatlantic voyages, or had commercial connections with the United States. In this afterlife of slavery in Liberia, the letter writers examined here relied on relationships with their former enslavers to remain connected to kin and community in the United States. In a second evocation of afterlives, these letters show how settlers' conceptualizations of home pressed beyond both the United States and Liberia. For them, "home" was reunification with family–a family that could only be made whole through a belief in a shared spiritual afterlife.
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Pub Date : 2023-03-01DOI: 10.1353/jnc.2023.a909291
Jewon Woo
Leslie Leonard's "Introduction to Frederick Douglass's 'Slavery'" Jewon Woo (bio) Frederick Douglass's 1894 essay, "Slavery," now gains our attention, thanks to Leslie Leonard's introduction and annotated edition.1 Although the essay never appeared in print and has been repeatedly left out of the various collections of his writings, it has survived in the Library of Congress archives.2 Their re(dis)covery of his essay reminds us of the timelessness of Douglass's work on Black liberation and the civil rights tradition. "Slavery" also intervenes in our ongoing conversation on the role of history in the context of nineteenth-century literary studies. As Leonard notes, Douglass's essay provides modern readers with clear historical linkages between enslavement and postbellum violence, and reaches into our contemporary iterations of the same structures. An effort to find the significance of early historical texts that challenge and transcend "the values and mores of people in their own times" may be belittled as mere "presentism."3 However, Douglass assures his readers that the past must not stay in "their own times," in contrast with apologists of slavery who insisted that it be relegated to a definite time frame antithetical to the present. Leonard's representation of Douglass as a historian and political philosopher suggests that demonstrating the past of racial slavery is not a presentist fashioning of racism but both a critical reckoning of its force shaping present conditions and a prophetic envisioning of the future. Douglass in "Slavery" aims his argument at emerging generations who "now know little or nothing about it either in theory or in practice."4 Instead of detailing the author's firsthand experience with the institution and abolitionism, his essay theorizes slavery as a system of [End Page 21] power through a comprehensive examination of history, philosophy, literature, and religion. This analysis requires readers to understand the slavery past in the context of the post-Reconstruction present of anti-Black violence and systemic racism, calling for the abolition of slavery and its afterlife at various levels of the nation. Interestingly, who might be his target audience in "Slavery" remains unclear. As Leonard points out, Black public intellectuals have crafted "a usable past for Black Americans"; Douglass must have had young Black readers in his mind to remind them that their ancestors "saved the American Republic from ruin, and invested it with a power and glory."5 At the same time, he invites white audiences, buttering them up with the familiar trope of Black patience and resilience as "the wisdom of the hour."6 However, Douglass emphasizes the resilience of Black Americans not to appease white fears of Black resistance but to demand that the nation acknowledge enslaved people's contribution to its economic, political, cultural, and spiritual foundation. He warns that if American historiography continues to exclude African American v
{"title":"Leslie Leonard's \"Introduction to Frederick Douglass's 'Slavery'\"","authors":"Jewon Woo","doi":"10.1353/jnc.2023.a909291","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/jnc.2023.a909291","url":null,"abstract":"Leslie Leonard's \"Introduction to Frederick Douglass's 'Slavery'\" Jewon Woo (bio) Frederick Douglass's 1894 essay, \"Slavery,\" now gains our attention, thanks to Leslie Leonard's introduction and annotated edition.1 Although the essay never appeared in print and has been repeatedly left out of the various collections of his writings, it has survived in the Library of Congress archives.2 Their re(dis)covery of his essay reminds us of the timelessness of Douglass's work on Black liberation and the civil rights tradition. \"Slavery\" also intervenes in our ongoing conversation on the role of history in the context of nineteenth-century literary studies. As Leonard notes, Douglass's essay provides modern readers with clear historical linkages between enslavement and postbellum violence, and reaches into our contemporary iterations of the same structures. An effort to find the significance of early historical texts that challenge and transcend \"the values and mores of people in their own times\" may be belittled as mere \"presentism.\"3 However, Douglass assures his readers that the past must not stay in \"their own times,\" in contrast with apologists of slavery who insisted that it be relegated to a definite time frame antithetical to the present. Leonard's representation of Douglass as a historian and political philosopher suggests that demonstrating the past of racial slavery is not a presentist fashioning of racism but both a critical reckoning of its force shaping present conditions and a prophetic envisioning of the future. Douglass in \"Slavery\" aims his argument at emerging generations who \"now know little or nothing about it either in theory or in practice.\"4 Instead of detailing the author's firsthand experience with the institution and abolitionism, his essay theorizes slavery as a system of [End Page 21] power through a comprehensive examination of history, philosophy, literature, and religion. This analysis requires readers to understand the slavery past in the context of the post-Reconstruction present of anti-Black violence and systemic racism, calling for the abolition of slavery and its afterlife at various levels of the nation. Interestingly, who might be his target audience in \"Slavery\" remains unclear. As Leonard points out, Black public intellectuals have crafted \"a usable past for Black Americans\"; Douglass must have had young Black readers in his mind to remind them that their ancestors \"saved the American Republic from ruin, and invested it with a power and glory.\"5 At the same time, he invites white audiences, buttering them up with the familiar trope of Black patience and resilience as \"the wisdom of the hour.\"6 However, Douglass emphasizes the resilience of Black Americans not to appease white fears of Black resistance but to demand that the nation acknowledge enslaved people's contribution to its economic, political, cultural, and spiritual foundation. He warns that if American historiography continues to exclude African American v","PeriodicalId":41876,"journal":{"name":"J19-The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135532193","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-03-01DOI: 10.1353/jnc.2023.a909293
Koritha Mitchell
Decency's Requirements Koritha Mitchell (bio) Reading Frederick Douglass's "Slavery" took me back to my earliest archival experiences. I was the first in my family to graduate from college, so my being in and successfully navigating a doctoral program was already a feat. I was excited to have access to yet another new frontier: I had secured opportunities to enter Howard University's Moorland-Spingarn Research Center and the Schomburg reading rooms at the New York Public Library. These experiences made me grateful that I had landed in English rather than history. When reading archival documents, I could not rid myself of the feeling that I was violating people's privacy, and I didn't like that feeling. However, I could see that the work I cherished emerged from such "violations." I have always preferred historically grounded literary and cultural criticism; I don't see much value in research that disregards material realities. So, I understood that if historians let feeling like they were violating a respected person's privacy stop them, they would not have sifted through the information that positioned them to produce the books and articles on which I relied to do historically informed work. "Slavery" was not included in the compilations of Douglass's writing edited by Philip Foner and by John Blassingame, so it remained available for Leslie Leonard's "rediscovery and publication" (357). Leonard's meticulous editing involves preservation of manuscript features, including Douglass's revisions, so having it in the world will allow scholars to offer analysis of various kinds. For example, some will place "Slavery" in conversation with other works, and some will draw [End Page 29] meaning from the editing decisions Douglass had made. Having the piece published will no doubt prove generative. Still, I cannot help but think about the substantial amount of Douglass's writing that circulates in the "finished" state that he signed off on before it entered the world. To have work that was not in that state circulate nevertheless??? That's not something I would be thrilled about, speaking as someone with both published writing and writing that isn't yet ready for publication. Should such considerations even enter scholars' minds when there's an opportunity to create their own finished product??? I can imagine arguments for why we should consider these issues, and I recognize countless incentives for not asking such questions. Leonard's introduction highlights how relevant "Slavery" is to our current historical moment, and I could not agree more. It resonates powerfully, given the ongoing attacks on Nikole Hannah-Jones's 1619 Project and the hysteria around what is disingenuously being called "critical race theory" in K–12 education. And that's to say nothing of the ever-present hostility in the higher education sector. This semester, when I started one of my classes with a land acknowledgement, a student walked out decisively and dropped the course. I appr
{"title":"Decency's Requirements","authors":"Koritha Mitchell","doi":"10.1353/jnc.2023.a909293","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/jnc.2023.a909293","url":null,"abstract":"Decency's Requirements Koritha Mitchell (bio) Reading Frederick Douglass's \"Slavery\" took me back to my earliest archival experiences. I was the first in my family to graduate from college, so my being in and successfully navigating a doctoral program was already a feat. I was excited to have access to yet another new frontier: I had secured opportunities to enter Howard University's Moorland-Spingarn Research Center and the Schomburg reading rooms at the New York Public Library. These experiences made me grateful that I had landed in English rather than history. When reading archival documents, I could not rid myself of the feeling that I was violating people's privacy, and I didn't like that feeling. However, I could see that the work I cherished emerged from such \"violations.\" I have always preferred historically grounded literary and cultural criticism; I don't see much value in research that disregards material realities. So, I understood that if historians let feeling like they were violating a respected person's privacy stop them, they would not have sifted through the information that positioned them to produce the books and articles on which I relied to do historically informed work. \"Slavery\" was not included in the compilations of Douglass's writing edited by Philip Foner and by John Blassingame, so it remained available for Leslie Leonard's \"rediscovery and publication\" (357). Leonard's meticulous editing involves preservation of manuscript features, including Douglass's revisions, so having it in the world will allow scholars to offer analysis of various kinds. For example, some will place \"Slavery\" in conversation with other works, and some will draw [End Page 29] meaning from the editing decisions Douglass had made. Having the piece published will no doubt prove generative. Still, I cannot help but think about the substantial amount of Douglass's writing that circulates in the \"finished\" state that he signed off on before it entered the world. To have work that was not in that state circulate nevertheless??? That's not something I would be thrilled about, speaking as someone with both published writing and writing that isn't yet ready for publication. Should such considerations even enter scholars' minds when there's an opportunity to create their own finished product??? I can imagine arguments for why we should consider these issues, and I recognize countless incentives for not asking such questions. Leonard's introduction highlights how relevant \"Slavery\" is to our current historical moment, and I could not agree more. It resonates powerfully, given the ongoing attacks on Nikole Hannah-Jones's 1619 Project and the hysteria around what is disingenuously being called \"critical race theory\" in K–12 education. And that's to say nothing of the ever-present hostility in the higher education sector. This semester, when I started one of my classes with a land acknowledgement, a student walked out decisively and dropped the course. I appr","PeriodicalId":41876,"journal":{"name":"J19-The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135532176","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-03-01DOI: 10.1353/jnc.2023.a909295
Ilana Larkin
Abstract: This article reads Louisa May Alcott's Little Women (1868) against nineteenth-century mothering manuals and the psychoanalytic object-relations theory to argue that the novel links maternal rage with infanticide. Feminist scholars have noted how Little Women , though ostensibly a story of family harmony, conceals a deep vein of anger. Jo March's trajectory, like that of other nineteenth-century sentimental heroines, stages a transformation from rebellious tomboy to self-controlled angel-in-the-house. Attending to the ways in which the text persistently links anger to infanticide, this article shows how the idealized angel-in-the-house functioned as an idealized solution to guard against the imagined dangers of female rage. Moreover, the binary between angel mothers and infanticidal ones was inflected with racial meaning that served to distinguish who was and wasn't included under the umbrella of national belonging. In recovering the spectre of infanticide subtending Little Women , this article asks us to re-evaluate the ways that cultural texts transmitted messages about love and rage and the political implications of how such relationships to affect determined the lives and developmental trajectories of children.
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Pub Date : 2023-03-01DOI: 10.1353/jnc.2023.a909298
Elizabeth Heinz Swails
Abstract: Thoreau spent much of his career preoccupied with thinking and with animals. In many of his excursions in the woods, he would be deep in thought when an owl, rabbit, otter, or some other creature's movements would catch his eye. Oftentimes, the animal and the tracks they left behind would lead him on a new trajectory, both mentally and physically. This essay focuses on moments of Thoreauvian epiphany when his thoughts, his walking body, and his animal encounters collide. In these moments, Thoreau successfully reads his own thoughts through the paths he takes just as he attempts to interpret animals' thoughts through the tracks they leave behind. By examining fox and moose tracks and walking in them in "Natural History of Massachusetts" (1842) and "Ktaadn" from The Main Woods (1864), Thoreau employs sympathetic tracking to produce animalistic thinking that leads him to some of his greatest epiphanies.
{"title":"Thoreau's Animal Thinking: Sympathetic Tracking to Epiphany","authors":"Elizabeth Heinz Swails","doi":"10.1353/jnc.2023.a909298","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/jnc.2023.a909298","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: Thoreau spent much of his career preoccupied with thinking and with animals. In many of his excursions in the woods, he would be deep in thought when an owl, rabbit, otter, or some other creature's movements would catch his eye. Oftentimes, the animal and the tracks they left behind would lead him on a new trajectory, both mentally and physically. This essay focuses on moments of Thoreauvian epiphany when his thoughts, his walking body, and his animal encounters collide. In these moments, Thoreau successfully reads his own thoughts through the paths he takes just as he attempts to interpret animals' thoughts through the tracks they leave behind. By examining fox and moose tracks and walking in them in \"Natural History of Massachusetts\" (1842) and \"Ktaadn\" from The Main Woods (1864), Thoreau employs sympathetic tracking to produce animalistic thinking that leads him to some of his greatest epiphanies.","PeriodicalId":41876,"journal":{"name":"J19-The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135532179","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-03-01DOI: 10.1353/jnc.2023.a909297
Matthew Pethers
Abstract: Since the late eighteenth century, observers of American poverty have often focused, in literal and metaphorical ways, on the faces of the economically dispossessed, finding in them a means to generate emotional responses that are more personalized than those offered by sociological data. For these writers, the "face of poverty" contains the potential to rectify the consignment of the poor to what Gavin Jones has called a "categorical blind spot" in U.S. culture, yet despite the long tradition of such efforts to reveal "the other America" this blindness seems to persist in contemporary literary analysis. This ongoing invisibility is in fact rooted in precisely the optical rhetoric that this tradition so often relies upon, a rhetoric whose origins and evasions I trace to the early nineteenth century, when modern discourses of poverty were being formulated. More specifically, I focus on the "parabolic mobility novel," a group of fictional narratives published from 1800-1815 that typically trace the fall into poverty and eventual providentially instigated return to wealth of bourgeois characters. Combining the theories of sympathy-as-self-identification expounded by Adam Smith with the interpretive logic of physiognomy-as-moral-interiority popularized by Johann Caspar Lavater, these novels produced a conservative model of the "politics of recognition" that, rather than involving an acknowledgment of the Other on their own terms, revolved around the projection of middle-class values onto the poor. Through their moments of anagnoristic recognition, the plots of these novels effectively established the now deeply ingrained tendency to replace the individuality of the poor with external beliefs and assumptions.
{"title":"The Face of Poverty: Physiognomics, Social Mobility, and the Politics of Recognition in the Early Nineteenth-Century American Novel","authors":"Matthew Pethers","doi":"10.1353/jnc.2023.a909297","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/jnc.2023.a909297","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: Since the late eighteenth century, observers of American poverty have often focused, in literal and metaphorical ways, on the faces of the economically dispossessed, finding in them a means to generate emotional responses that are more personalized than those offered by sociological data. For these writers, the \"face of poverty\" contains the potential to rectify the consignment of the poor to what Gavin Jones has called a \"categorical blind spot\" in U.S. culture, yet despite the long tradition of such efforts to reveal \"the other America\" this blindness seems to persist in contemporary literary analysis. This ongoing invisibility is in fact rooted in precisely the optical rhetoric that this tradition so often relies upon, a rhetoric whose origins and evasions I trace to the early nineteenth century, when modern discourses of poverty were being formulated. More specifically, I focus on the \"parabolic mobility novel,\" a group of fictional narratives published from 1800-1815 that typically trace the fall into poverty and eventual providentially instigated return to wealth of bourgeois characters. Combining the theories of sympathy-as-self-identification expounded by Adam Smith with the interpretive logic of physiognomy-as-moral-interiority popularized by Johann Caspar Lavater, these novels produced a conservative model of the \"politics of recognition\" that, rather than involving an acknowledgment of the Other on their own terms, revolved around the projection of middle-class values onto the poor. Through their moments of anagnoristic recognition, the plots of these novels effectively established the now deeply ingrained tendency to replace the individuality of the poor with external beliefs and assumptions.","PeriodicalId":41876,"journal":{"name":"J19-The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135532518","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-03-01DOI: 10.1353/jnc.2023.a909302
E. / I. H. Gould
The Phantom; Or, The Miser's Dream, &c.1 E. / I. H. Gould2 The last of the stories published under the Gould pseudonym in March 1860, "The Phantom," traces, if it is indeed by Alcott, her maturing entry into the sensation mode—a mix of sentimentality and gothic—that earlier stories, like "The Painter's Dream," anticipate. For example, like "The Painter's Dream," this story notably turns on a phantasmic dream sequence; more broadly the story features tropes of gothic romance (previously artistic rivalry, here shipwreck) but hinges even more on the mundane questions of familial relations. Most obviously the story reads as a proto-feminist rewriting of Charles Dickens's Christmas Carol, an author and tale Alcott certainly knew well. One notices the playful coins speaking, a theatrical twist one might attribute to Alcott's many experiences adapting Dickens stories for the stage. But more importantly, the choice to accuse the old miser, and the Captain, not only of the crime of antisocial greed but of a sexual quid pro quo opens up new context in which to examine other works of Alcott's for their gothic-feminist critiques, if indeed this Gould story is hers. [End Page 203] Click for larger view View full resolution The first page of "The Phantom." Image courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society. ________ As dark shadows were beginning to envelop the city one rainy afternoon, Simon Mudge entered his little hovel, threw off what might once have been called an overcoat, and seating himself upon the hearth close to a few smoking fagots, he drew from his pocket a bag, and emptying its contents upon a table, began to compute its value. Every piece of gold had been replaced in the bag, several jewels had been examined, and carefully placed in his pocket, when he took up a ring, and in holding it to the light to determine its exact value, he perceived an inscription on the inside. As he examined it more closely, his features grew [End Page 204] pale and rigid, while his hand trembled till the ring dropped from his grasp. He now began to start at every sound, and glance wildly about the room. In doing so he perceived a footprint, which he felt quite sure, on first examination, could not have been made by himself.3 "Can it be possible any one has entered […]-quired."4 Seeing nothing to confirm his suspicion except the one footprint, he again seated himself, and indulged in the rare luxury of a lighted candle, for every sound started him. The last ember died out, and the fast consuming candle was too great extravagance for Simon Mudge long to indulge; therefore, extinguishing it he crept upon his miserable pallet. He slept at length, but he was troubled by dreams. A phantom stood beside him. "Who are you, and what seek you in a poor man's hovel?" inquired the miser. "You call yourself poor," replied the phantom, "but you think yourself rich, sleeping as you do upon a bed of coins. I am come to give voice to each of these, and teach you how really poor you are
{"title":"The Phantom; Or, The Miser's Dream, &c.","authors":"E. / I. H. Gould","doi":"10.1353/jnc.2023.a909302","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/jnc.2023.a909302","url":null,"abstract":"The Phantom; Or, The Miser's Dream, &c.1 E. / I. H. Gould2 The last of the stories published under the Gould pseudonym in March 1860, \"The Phantom,\" traces, if it is indeed by Alcott, her maturing entry into the sensation mode—a mix of sentimentality and gothic—that earlier stories, like \"The Painter's Dream,\" anticipate. For example, like \"The Painter's Dream,\" this story notably turns on a phantasmic dream sequence; more broadly the story features tropes of gothic romance (previously artistic rivalry, here shipwreck) but hinges even more on the mundane questions of familial relations. Most obviously the story reads as a proto-feminist rewriting of Charles Dickens's Christmas Carol, an author and tale Alcott certainly knew well. One notices the playful coins speaking, a theatrical twist one might attribute to Alcott's many experiences adapting Dickens stories for the stage. But more importantly, the choice to accuse the old miser, and the Captain, not only of the crime of antisocial greed but of a sexual quid pro quo opens up new context in which to examine other works of Alcott's for their gothic-feminist critiques, if indeed this Gould story is hers. [End Page 203] Click for larger view View full resolution The first page of \"The Phantom.\" Image courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society. ________ As dark shadows were beginning to envelop the city one rainy afternoon, Simon Mudge entered his little hovel, threw off what might once have been called an overcoat, and seating himself upon the hearth close to a few smoking fagots, he drew from his pocket a bag, and emptying its contents upon a table, began to compute its value. Every piece of gold had been replaced in the bag, several jewels had been examined, and carefully placed in his pocket, when he took up a ring, and in holding it to the light to determine its exact value, he perceived an inscription on the inside. As he examined it more closely, his features grew [End Page 204] pale and rigid, while his hand trembled till the ring dropped from his grasp. He now began to start at every sound, and glance wildly about the room. In doing so he perceived a footprint, which he felt quite sure, on first examination, could not have been made by himself.3 \"Can it be possible any one has entered […]-quired.\"4 Seeing nothing to confirm his suspicion except the one footprint, he again seated himself, and indulged in the rare luxury of a lighted candle, for every sound started him. The last ember died out, and the fast consuming candle was too great extravagance for Simon Mudge long to indulge; therefore, extinguishing it he crept upon his miserable pallet. He slept at length, but he was troubled by dreams. A phantom stood beside him. \"Who are you, and what seek you in a poor man's hovel?\" inquired the miser. \"You call yourself poor,\" replied the phantom, \"but you think yourself rich, sleeping as you do upon a bed of coins. I am come to give voice to each of these, and teach you how really poor you are","PeriodicalId":41876,"journal":{"name":"J19-The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135532220","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-03-01DOI: 10.1353/jnc.2023.a909300
Max L. Chapnick
Abstract: This essay introduces a set of published but as-yet-unidentified Louisa May Alcott work including: pieces under Alcott's own name that are certainly Alcott's, pieces published anonymously or under known pseudonyms that are very likely Alcott's, and pieces published under a likely new pseudonym, I. or E. H. Gould, that are probably Alcott's. The uncertainty of authorship presented here aims to raise methodological and historicist questions about the author-function in a culture of ambiguous attribution: that writers in Alcott's time participated in author guessing-games and that today's scholarship could be more willing to engage the possibilities of not knowing. Focusing on the fiction, this essay argues that the new pieces from the 1850s produce a reassessment of Alcott's career: rather than her 1860s sensation fiction leading to the later domestic fiction, the sensation fiction of the 1860s itself emerges from years of earlier experimentation. As representative of the newly identified fiction, this essay introduces one short story under Alcott's own name and one short story under the Gould pseudonym.
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Pub Date : 2023-03-01DOI: 10.1353/jnc.2023.a909299
Timothy Sweet
Abstract: This essay develops a theory of the literary excerpt, taking as a case study the ways in which James Russell Lowell's 1845 poem "The Present Crisis" has been quoted in public discourse by abolitionists, suffragists, temperance activists, anti-imperialists, and Civil Rights activists including W. E. B. Du Bois and Martin Luther King, Jr. A prominent recent instance is U.S. Senate Chaplain Barry Black's quotation from the poem in his opening prayer for the second impeachment trial of Donald Trump. Tracing these and other histories of excerpting "The Present Crisis," the essay draws on Rhetorical Genre Studies to argue that the literary excerpt is a distinct paraliterary genre, a form of social action that enables two purposes: bringing literary authority to nonliterary domains and participating in a tradition through repetition. Attention to the excerpt genre's pragmatics can thus bring the question of instrumentality (back) to considerations of literariness.
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