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Early-19th-Century Literature

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 American Literary Scholarship

12  Early-19th-Century Literature

Kristin Boudreau

This year’s scholarship would suggest that authors are shrinking in

importance next to the cultural issues that affected 19th-century liter-
ary production. With the exception of Poe, whose popularity among
scholars has not waned, individual authors receive much less attention
this year than do the political, social, and material contexts of writ-
ing, the most important of these being globalization, print culture,
adaptation and appropriation, and the convergences of law and litera-
ture. Although the topic of slavery, for instance, continues to inspire
energetic and innovative scholarship, even such an influential African
American writer as Frederick Douglass is a minor figure in this year’s
scholarship, and treatment of other African American writers is minimal
except within the context of larger period studies. With such sparse
attention to individual authors, the biographies of Cooper and Irving
and some important essay collections on Cooper stand out among this
year’s works, with significant attention being paid in other quarters to
Cooper’s novelist daughter.

i  Period Studies
The topic of slavery continues to dominate period studies. Jeannine
Marie DeLombard’s splendid Slavery on Trial proposes that antebel-
lum treatments of slavery adopted legal rhetoric in order to enact their

*The author would like to thank Mollie Barnes for her assistance in researching this
essay.

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doi 10.1215/00659142-2008-005 © 2009 by Duke University Press

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own legal contests in print when actual courthouses failed to live up

to their constitutional promise. When the cheap press made possible
widespread spectatorship of sensational trials, actual legal crises over
slavery became central to abolitionist print campaigns, as DeLom-
bard demonstrates in her readings of both actual and literary “trials.”
Central to her discussion is an examination of the key tactics of abo-
litionists: to frame abolitionist rhetoric as the only effective defender
of both free speech and habeas corpus, and to authorize various forms
of African American speech by transforming black speech from guilty
confession to righteous witness to legal advocate. Focusing on criminal
trials rather than constitutional or property law, DeLombard demon-
strates how abolitionists first had to shed their identity as criminals
before indicting slaveholders for the crime of slavery. Through her care-
ful and often brilliant readings of the rhetoric of trials and abolition-
ist literature (both obscure and familiar), DeLombard demonstrates
the powerful symbolic significance of print in the nation’s cultural
history. Her attentive readings bear fascinating fruit, for example,
in her consideration of several fugitive slave rendition trials, where
the symbolism of a courthouse sealed from spectators suggests what
abolitionist rhetoric made clearer still: that the courts, closed to the
public, served the interests of the slaveholding South, and that “the
antebellum courthouse . . . could no longer stand as the architectural
symbol of impartial justice” but must give way to a print culture that
could acquire value only by confronting the injustice of slavery. Her
fresh readings of Douglass’s autobiographies find new insights in both
less-discussed passages (Douglass’s beating in a Baltimore shipyard)
and their well-combed counterparts (the murder of the slave Demby).
Later chapters consider how Stowe recognized but could not over-
come the limits to black discursive autonomy, how defenders of slavery
“countersued” by arguing that the sectional dispute was a civil rather
than a criminal matter, and how illustrated press coverage of the John
Brown trial documented the inevitability of a military rather than legal
solution to slavery. DeLombard’s book is a gem both in its details and
in its overall structure and makes a persuasive case for the mutually
constitutive relationship between law and print culture.
An excellent essay in William W. Demastes and Iris Smith Fischer’s
edited collection Interrogating America Through Theatre and Perfor-
mance considers a number of antislavery plays within Pierre Bourdieu’s
framework of various forms of capital. Amy E. Hughes’s “Defining

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Kristin Boudreau 259

Faith: Theatrical Reactions to Pro-Slavery Christianity in Antebellum

America” (pp. 29–45) argues that plays by William Wells Brown, Dan-
iel S. Whitney, and an anonymous writer attack Christian defenses of
slavery by distinguishing between the empty “religious capital” enjoyed
by hypocritical proslavery preachers and the more authentic “spiritual
capital” claimed by antislavery activists. These playwrights, Hughes
contends, saw themselves primarily as activists waging ideological war
against proslavery arguments wielded on religious terrain. Abolitionist
dramatists questioned the spiritual capital of proslavery ideologues and
thereby “attempted not only to define faith, but to construct a defining
faith for America—a process that intellectuals on both sides of the slav-
ery debate recognized as vital to victory.” Hughes’s fine close readings
of these plays make a convincing case for the important role of even
middlebrow drama in the contest over slavery; these plays, she suggests,
powerfully undermined the authority of religious leaders by allowing
lay audiences to accumulate “spiritual capital” even when they did not
enjoy “religious capital.”
Jordan Alexander Stein’s “ ‘A Christian Nation Calls for Its Wander-
ing Children’: Life, Liberty, Liberia” (AmLH 19: 849–73) places Sarah J.
Hale’s novel Liberia and Martin Delaney’s political writings at the center
of 19th-century discussions of national life and political identity. Juxta-
posing these two apparently incompatible writers—one a conservative
Christian who endorsed colonization for blacks, the other a radical who
rejected that option in favor of a separate nation in North America—
Stein urges us to see them as part of an overlooked chapter of American
history in which nations were imagined not as the source of racism but
as the solution. Both Hale and Delaney believed in the proliferation of
nations to accommodate different races, and Stein reveals their common
faith that a black national state was the precondition for full human
rights. Stein’s discussion is most interesting in its details, particularly
in the reading of Liberia, in which “geopolitical displacement” is nec-
essary for the kind of equality Hale imagines for her black characters.
Although most of Leslie W. Lewis’s Telling Narratives falls beyond the
historical parameters of this chapter, her Hegelian reading of American
slavery is worth mentioning here. Recognizing that the Hegelian subject
represents a significant Western construct of human consciousness but
rejecting Hegel’s insistence on this subject as exclusively male, Lewis
explores the relationship between male masters and female slaves to
show that women were not, as Hegel contended, outside of history but

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indeed rearranged the public order in their narratives, informing read-

ers about the private lives of masters and slaves. Lewis’s study of secrets
in African American narrative—an inevitable effect of slavery—begins
with a chapter on Douglass and Jacobs.
A global perspective continues to shape discussions of American
studies, with Cooper figuring prominently in two essays that are more
political than literary. In “Histories of Democracy and Empire” (AQ 59:
107–33) Sandra M. Gustafson takes issue with two assumptions that she
claims are central to American studies: that citizens of the early United
States were unaware of the nation’s “imperial status” and that democracy
is incompatible with empire. Gustafson examines the years between
1815 and 1835—represented here by Daniel Webster, Cooper, and Simón
Bolívar—to argue that the concept of democracy was elaborated and
its relationship with empire clarified by means of a “world context of
revolution and counterrevolution” in France, Haiti, Cuba, and Greece.
Americanists can better understand the meaning(s) of American democ-
racy if we consider the “circulation of revolutionary ideas” within a
global context. Reading Cooper’s The Prairie and The Bravo in this way,
Gustafson challenges the standard reading of the Leatherstocking Tales
as “a paean to American empire” and instead argues that Cooper’s novels
“offer a sensitive register of the emerging and heterogeneous meanings of
democracy, and in particular the relationship of democracy to empire.”
Cooper is also pivotal to Thomas Clark’s “ ‘The American Democrat’
Reads Democracy in America: Cooper and Tocqueville in the Transat-
lantic Hall of Mirrors” (Amst 52: 187–208), which considers the political
theories of these two writers and concludes that while both feared the
excesses of mass democracy, they defined democracy differently, Coo-
per seeing it as a society based on the interdependence of equal rights
with social inequality and Tocqueville understanding it as equality of
condition. The contention of Leonard Tennenhouse’s Importance of Feel-
ing English is that contrary to the many critical attempts to identify a
uniquely American literature in the 18th and early 19th centuries, Ameri-
can colonists did not renounce their British identity “simply because
they rejected British government.” Instead, Tennenhouse uses the notion
of diaspora to argue that American writers “tried to maintain an Eng-
lish cultural identity” by reproducing in the New World the cultural
practices of the homeland, reading British books and magazines and,
paradoxically, challenging the authority of British culture by “claiming
to be more British than their English counterparts.” In Tennenhouse’s

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reading—which begins with 18th-century American writers—Stowe

drew on English tales of the libertine, Cooper inherited the English
“man of feeling” from both Charles Brockden Brown and Austen, and
Poe deliberately severed ties with “an imaginary and artificially reconsti-
tuted homeland.” Brian Yothers surveys a range of writers in Romance of
the Holy Land, proposing that 18th-century Barbary captivity narratives
influenced later writings about the Middle East and that devout Prot-
estants who visited the Holy Land set parameters for the more literary
travelers (Bayard Taylor and William Cullen Bryant among others) who
followed them to Palestine. Yothers contends that four kinds of Ameri-
can orientalism informed the travel narratives he studies: an “intellectual
strand” interested in ancient cultures, a “popular strand” curious about
the orient, a “pious strand” represented by missionary writers, and an
archaeological fascination with the sacred landscape.
Two monographs explore literary traditions. In America’s Gothic
Fiction Dorothy Z. Baker extends Cotton Mather’s influence to 19th-
century fiction. Arguing that Mather blended his insistence on provi-
dential design with a shrewd sense of what his audience wanted to read,
Baker demonstrates how later writers echo and subvert his narrative
strategies. If Mather presented his wonder-working accounts to shore up
a waning commitment to Calvinist orthodoxy, Poe adapted these same
plots (the gallows confession, the deliverance at sea, and the stories of
self-murder) while rejecting Mather’s themes of epiphany, regeneration,
and salvation. For Baker, Stowe’s The Pearl of Orr’s Island is less skepti-
cal of the presence of providence but does challenge Mather’s claim that
only a minister can document and explain history, while Sedgwick’s
Hope Leslie “asks the reader to hear the cacophony of all the voices
because the nation’s history is noisy, frenzied, and conflicted.” Max
Cavitch’s American Elegy offers a comprehensive view of the “unbroken
history” of elegy in English-speaking North America from colonial days.
Cavitch calls attention to the thematic and formal diversity of elegy and
the “series of profound social and psychological shifts” that affected
the practices of mourning and the writing of elegies. Relevant here are
chapters about Bryant and African American elegies.
While many of the works surveyed here concern national history and
identity, two monographs are more explicitly devoted to those topics.
A useful introduction to a wide range of obscure plays, Tice L. Miller’s
Entertaining the Nation considers these plays as historical documents
that reveal cultural changes. Plays, Miller contends, helped not only to

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entertain but also to educate both established and recently arrived Amer-
icans about current events and cultural norms. “As the crucible where
advanced ideas about marriage and divorce, ethics and morality, race
and gender were put before the public, the theatre served as a civilizing
force in the establishment of this nation.” In chapters on early republi-
can and Jacksonian drama, Miller notes that although politics had kept
any guarantee of equality out of the Constitution, these plays reflect
Americans’ intuitive understanding that their founders had intended
to ensure equality to all. In Remodeling the Nation Duncan Faherty
explores the evolution of a familiar American trope figuring houses as
an image of national identity. Contesting the old division between pub-
lic and private, Faherty shows how domestic interiors helped interpret
national history and foster social connections. In his chapter on Irving,
for example, he explores how Irving’s writings and Sunnyside residence
promote the ideal of “rooted domestication”; architecture suggests “the
flexibility that occurs naturally when individuals commit themselves,
and their progeny, to a particular region.” Faherty’s Irving insists on
the redevelopment of previous architectural and cultural structures as a
bastion against “the consequences of rampant rootlessness on national
development.” In his chapter on three generations of Coopers, Faherty
notes that the novelist, too, was suspicious of American development
and suggested connections between domestic architecture and com-
munity construction. Reading the novelist’s writings alongside those of
his father and daughter, Faherty traces “the shifts in opinion, over time,
on the importance of a central house within a community as a register
of social stability.” In his brief consideration of Poe, Faherty argues
that Poe’s houses offer “no haven from the terror of the outside world”;
instead, one’s precarious social position under Jacksonian government
is figured architecturally in Poe’s tales.
Print culture is the theme of many of this year’s works, includ-
ing a major essay on political poetry and one important book. Trish
Loughran’s Republic in Print takes aim at Benedict Anderson’s thesis
that printed material nationalized the public sphere in the early years of
the nation. Instead, Loughran argues that “there was no ‘nationalized’
print public sphere” prior to the 1830s but “rather a proliferating variety
of local and regional publics scattered across a vast and diverse geo-
graphical space.” Much of this intriguing book is devoted to an account
of nation formation in the absence of a national print culture; the chap-
ters that concern us here deal with slavery and Loughran’s contention

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that mid-century shared print culture fragmented rather than unified

the nation. Loughran considers two stages in abolition, the local and
serial gradualism of the early abolitionist movement and the national
and synchronic approach of the American Anti-Slavery Society, which
“insist[ed] on the connections, rather than the disconnections, among
the many local landscapes that slavery and antislavery inhabited.” In
her readings of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Clotel, and Twelve Years a Slave,
Loughran argues that emerging industrial networks in the 1850s made
possible a “profound economic and geographic integration” that con-
solidated the “different parts of the extended republic,” thereby expos-
ing the “geographical incoherence over which the fiction of union had
originally been written.” It was this national consolidation, she argues,
that paradoxically provoked the crisis over slavery at mid-century.
A different abolition movement is the subject of Paul Christian Jones’s
fine essay “The Politics of Poetry: The Democratic Review and the Gal-
lows Verse of William Wordsworth and John Greenleaf Whittier”
(AmPer 17: 1–25), which explores the argument against capital punish-
ment transacted in the poetry and prose of the Democratic Review.
Beginning with an 1842 editorial attacking Wordsworth and his pro-
gallows Sonnets upon the Punishment of Death, Jones traces the Review’s
efforts not only to discredit Wordsworth and contest capital punish-
ment but also to establish populist and reformist standards for poetry.
Arguing that poets were obliged to write in defense of progressive and
Christian principles—that “all truly inspired verse is the outpouring of
the spirit of freedom”—the Democratic Review urged American poets to
resist Wordsworth’s conservative example and write democratic poetry.
Jones devotes much of his excellent essay to a detailed consideration of
the many poems Whittier published in the Review, demonstrating that
Whittier served as a counterexample to Wordsworth and a model for
poets who wished to embrace the Review’s exhortation to resist Anglo-
philic literary standards and instead produce populist native literature.
In the process, Jones establishes the importance of the anti-gallows
movement alongside other political causes that influenced the literature
of the American Renaissance.
Thomas Augst and Kenneth Carpenter’s edited volume Institutions
of Reading contains two essays of interest here. Michael A. Baenen’s
“A Great and Natural Enemy of Democracy: Politics and Culture in
the Antebellum Portsmouth Athenæum” (pp. 72–98) explores battles
over the civic role of this Jacksonian institution, seen by many in the

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community as an elite gathering place that excluded Democrats and

those who did not share the social and economic privileges of the mem-
bers. In “ ‘An Association of Kindred Spirits’: Black Readers and Their
Reading Rooms” (pp. 99–118) Elizabeth McHenry considers the “sturdy
communities” of free blacks that formed in the urban north during the
first decades of the 19th century. While the reading rooms established
by these people suggest their belief in the personally and culturally
transformative power of reading, McHenry emphasizes the value they
placed on “habits of reading and reflection” as well as the more rudi-
mentary acquisition of literacy. The Industrial Book, 1840–1880, ed. Scott
E. Casper et al. (AAS/No. Car.), the third volume in A History of the
Book in America series, deserves mention here, although the essays are
more historical than literary. The “industrial book” was the product of
industrialization in both the printing and papermaking trades, and this
collection of essays considers the production of industrial books, the
emergence of a national book trade system, the efforts to define Ameri-
can themes as well as to package “American books,” the middle-class
values embodied in the new book culture of this era, and the factors that
challenged the nationalization of the industrial book.

ii  Poe
Most Poe scholarship this year involves close readings with implications
that do not extend beyond the works discussed. An exception—and
one of the most interesting and consequential readings of Poe—comes
from Matthew A. Taylor, whose “Edgar Allan Poe’s (Meta)Physics: A
Pre-History of the Post-Human” (NCF 62: 193–221) focuses not on
Poe’s subjects but on the universe of things that both constitute and
annihilate these subjects. While 19th-century thought scrutinized the
universe for a unified force that humans could harness for their benefit,
Poe regarded humans not as “sovereign entities” but as “manipulable
effects of external powers.” In his reading of Eureka, “Mesmeric Rev-
elation,” and “The Fall of the House of Usher,” Taylor illustrates how
repeatedly in Poe a cosmic force superintends the fate of all things,
including humans. Eureka tells with “ecstatic insight” the “sinister fate”
of disintegration into the universe that awaits us all, while Poe’s tales
“obsessively rehearse” that same story. Surprisingly but persuasively,
Taylor reads even “Ligeia” not as an account of an individual will that
survives death but as the story of an individual who uncannily perceives

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her dissolution into the universe of common objects. Ligeia, he claims,

“is an abstraction made concrete. What survives death, therefore, is not
a person” but the “impersonal principle” of life. Taylor’s reading does
not sacrifice the details to his comprehensive reading of Poe that situates
the writer within the scientific and philosophical traditions of his day.
If Taylor urges us to see Poe as having accepted impersonal principles
without complaint, Elizabeth Duquette’s Poe is an outraged human-
ist. In “Accounting for Value in ‘The Business Man’ ” (SAF 35: 3–20)
Duquette reads Poe’s 1840 tale as a satire on “American-style moral
economy” whose obsession with things turns thought, truth, and per-
sons into commodities. “The tale’s more ambitious aspect, hidden under
the satire, is the claim that when method is indistinguishable from
numerical accounting—when philosophy and mathematics are inter-
changeable—then . . . thought itself is up for sale and method becomes
a means of discrimination in the fullest sense of the word.”
As always, a number of essays concern Poe’s treatment of women.
Dawn Keetley’s excellent “Pregnant Women and Envious Men in
‘Morella,’ ‘Berenice,’ ‘Ligeia,’ and ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ ”
(PoeS 38: 1–16) draws on the work of Melanie Klein to argue that these
stories share an unconscious and enraged preoccupation with women’s
reproductivity. Observing that Klein theorizes the envious and hostile
“gothic bond” between Poe’s male infants and their mothers, Keetley
claims that the 19th century’s “veritable civic religion of motherhood”
explains this hostility as a phenomenon specific to Poe’s age rather than,
as Klein argued, universal to the human experience. Keetley’s readings
are careful, detailed, and persuasive. In the same issue of PoeS, Eve Célia
Morisi’s “The Female Figure of Poe’s Poetry: A Rehabilitation” (pp.
17–28) argues that if Poe’s women are insubstantial as characters, they
are not therefore empty but rather “act as vehicles for other determining
values—be they aesthetic, temporal, spatial, and/or symbolic.” Morisi
catalogs the various aesthetic and functional roles that women play as
poetic images in Poe’s poetry: they represent not only the “fragmentary
and complementary iconographies” drawn from literature and the visual
arts but also the “essential concepts that structure and universalize”
poetic space. If the argument here is simple—Morisi wants to rescue Poe
from the charge that he annihilates his female figures—her readings are
strong and her attention to Poe’s poetry is welcome. William Crisman
elaborates on a point Morisi makes: that Helen of Troy is one of the
legendary women whom Poe uses as a model for his female characters.

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Crisman’s “Poe’s Ligeia and Helen of Troy” (PoeS 38: 64–75) argues that
Ligeia’s ambiguous role as “the victimizing victim” makes sense if we
see Helen as one of her sources. Crisman’s astute reading turns between
Poe’s tale and Book 4 of the Odyssey for a physical description of Helen,
then to Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus for an account of Helen’s relationship
with Faust, which resembles Ligeia’s with the narrator. The evidence
that Poe drew on Homer is substantial and persuasive, but Crisman is
most interesting on the topic of speech and silence: Faust is specifically
forbidden from speaking in the presence of Helen’s ghost, just as Poe’s
narrator feels himself under orders not to ask Ligeia about her origins,
though both men finally break this rule. In “Poe’s Visual Tricks” (PoeS
38: 53–63) Barbara Cantalupo proposes that the reincarnation of Ligeia
in the body of Rowena can be explained rationally if we recall Poe’s
fascination with visual tricks and his reading of David Brewster’s Letters
on Natural Magic. The narrator of “Ligeia” mentions anamorphosis, the
manipulation of perspective to create an image that is hidden except
when viewed from a particular perspective, and Cantalupo suggests
that Poe’s narrator has designed the interior of his bridal chamber with
anamorphic features that he later forgets in his grief and inebriation.
In despair that Ligeia cannot overcome death, he uses the tricks of his
“phantasmagoric chamber” to simulate the recovery of his dead wife.
An essay in Lucy E. Frank’s edited collection Representations of Death
argues that Poe pitted himself against the sentimental cult of death.
Elizabeth Carolyn Miller’s “ ‘At a Distance from the Scene of the Atroc-
ity’: Death and Detachment in Poe’s ‘The Mystery of Marie Rogêt’ ” (pp.
173–88) argues that while Poe depicts mass mourning for his subject as
“overly feminized” and excessive, his own detached and scientific treat-
ment of her mutilated corpse aligns him with modernism in its rejection
of “the feminized flotsam and jetsam of cultural mass production.” On
the other hand, Mónica Peláez’s excellent “The Sentimental Poe” (EAPR
8, ii: 65–85) argues that while Poe’s poetry indicates “misgivings” about
the sentimental tastes of his day, he was also much more immersed in the
sentimental tradition than critics have perhaps acknowledged. Reading
Poe’s poetry alongside his reviews and the poetry of his contemporaries,
Peláez demonstrates that Poe, like others writing for periodical readers,
invoked the tropes of “sentimental death” to turn loss into solace.
The topics of reading and writing are the explicit focus of several essays
on Poe. Rachel Bowlby’s “Readable City” (PMLA 122: 306–09) draws on
“The Man of the Crowd” to ask why we use the metaphor of “reading the

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city.” Bowlby notes that Poe’s narrator is reading a newspaper when his
attention is absorbed by the crowd outside. The early-19th-century city,
Bowlby reminds us, put “urban reading” in the path of the city dweller
in the form of daily newspapers and posters, while the city dweller was
more likely literate than in earlier ages. In “Reconstructing Poe’s ‘The
Gold Bug’: An Examination of the Composition and First Printing(s)”
(EAPR 8, ii: 34–48) Jeffrey A. Savoye considers Poe’s biography and the
“unusual internal complexities” of the tale to identify a more precise date
of composition. Thomas Leitch claims Poe as a “prophet of the modern
short story” in “On the Margins of Mystery: The Detective in Poe and
After,” pp. 25–47 in José R. Ibáñez et al., eds., Contemporary Debates on
the Short Story (Peter Lang), which argues that Poe established himself
as an unrivaled theorist of short fiction whose ambitious claims for the
short story (economy, unity of effect, and the subordination of incident
to theme or tone) are realized in his detective fiction. Every one of Poe’s
stories aims at a narrative structure of mystery that Leitch argues is
“central to Poe’s theory and practice” and is a hallmark of the modern
short story. Jeffrey A. Savoye’s brief “Sinking under Iniquity” (EAPR 8,
i: 70–74) offers intriguing evidence that in composing “Usher” Poe may
have drawn on childhood memories of a visit to Scotland, his memory
revived by the publication of Walter Scott’s Minstrelsy of the Scottish
Border, which describes the castle of Hermitage as sunken under a “load
of iniquity.” Savoye’s historical detail leaves ample room for the work of
Poe’s imagination in composing the tale.
With the year’s emphasis on global studies, Poe inevitably invites
discussions of his imperialism. Matthew Teorey’s “Into the Imperial
Whirlpool: Poe’s ‘MS. Found in a Bottle’ and the United States South
Seas Exploration Expedition” (PoeS 38: 43–52) correlates the various
dates of this story’s (re)publication with stages in Jeremiah Reynolds’s
efforts to organize an expedition to the South Pacific, arguing that Poe
meant his story to support the expedition even as he warned against
the dangers of such missions. At times Teorey lapses into a disappoint-
ing narrowness, explaining away ambiguity by insisting on a symbolic
lexicon, interpreting the unexpected storm, for instance, as either “a
mutiny of the Malays” or “an attack by a group of Polynesians.” But the
general argument—that the dead writer’s manuscript both celebrates
explorers who follow him and warns about “the difficulties and dangers
of colonialism”—is interesting in light of the historical context Teorey
supplies.

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iii  Cooper, Irving, and Other Regional Writers

Cooper regains importance this year, with a major biography and two
essay collections. Wayne Franklin’s James Fenimore Cooper: The Early
Years (Yale) fills in with considerable detail while substantially revising
our picture of this early novelist, whose own story corresponds so closely
with the nation’s cultural landscape. James F. Beard, the first literary
scholar to have full access to the Cooper archive, did major editorial
work in publishing first the Cooper papers and journals and then the
Cooper Edition of the novels, but as Franklin notes, Beard died before
getting very far into his much-anticipated biography, leaving a scholarly
vacuum unusual for a major American writer (though Franklin omits
mention of Donald Ringe’s 1962 biography). Cooper’s literary treatment
still suffers, Franklin argues, from the inadequacy of all other Cooper
biographies and the unfair early depictions that originated in political
differences, giving reviewers “easy formulations” for dismissing Coo-
per on aesthetic grounds. Franklin contextualizes the aesthetic lapses
in Cooper’s novels by minutely detailing the complicated and often
careless process of editing and typesetting that went into production
of the first editions, along with Cooper’s constant need for ready cash
that caused him to hurry his works into print. On the other hand, he
reminds us that if Mark Twain lampooned Cooper’s literary excesses,
the novelist also had his admirers, among them Melville, Conrad, and
Lawrence. And while recent literary critics accuse Cooper of taking a
romantic but uncritical view of the vanishing American Indian, Frank-
lin’s Cooper is a very different sort, one who identified with America’s
dispossessed tribes: “For Cooper’s land-developed father, the story of
Cooperstown was obviously a story of possession; for his youngest son,
partly because he saw it all slip from the family’s hands, it became a
tale of dispossession. Cooper’s own losses made those of the land and
its prior inhabitants emotionally intelligible to him.” This first volume
covers Cooper’s life to 1826, emphasizing economic concerns and what
Franklin calls the “biography of his books”: the origin of Cooper’s liter-
ary ideas and the process of writing and publishing. The biography is
long and full of detail, describing Cooper’s knowledge of Indian lore,
his concern about environmental changes, and his “postcolonial rage”
from seeing shipmates unwillingly impressed into the British royal navy.
While many readers will lament the excessive detail in this work, where
Franklin sometimes leaves his main character for many pages while

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chronicling national history like the War of 1812, others will welcome
this biography, especially its later chapters that tell the story of Cooper’s
developing literary career.
Leland S. Person joins Franklin in emphasizing Cooper’s literary
achievements rather than his offenses. Essays collected in Person’s A
Historical Guide to James Fenimore Cooper (Oxford) situate the novelist
in his cultural context. As Person notes in his introduction (pp. 3–26),
Cooper “had a good ear for the controversies of his day,” a sensibility
that Person illustrates in his readings of Home as Found (where the
settlers’ deteriorating relationship to the land signals their declining
moral condition) and The Ways of the Hour (which “engages in a spirited
debate” about recent legislation and is “embedded in . . . ongoing politi-
cal debates about the balance of powers, voting rights, women’s rights,
and slavery”). A biographical essay by Franklin (pp. 27–57) provides
in 31 readable pages the story that gets lost in his larger biography; for
Franklin, Cooper “imagin[ed] possession and dispossession as linked
truths” and “made loss a salient theme in all his frontier books.” John
P. McWilliams argues in “ ‘More Than a Woman’s Enterprise’: Cooper’s
Revolutionary Heroines and the Source of Liberty” (pp. 61–90) that in
Cooper’s Revolutionary War novels, young women advance national
political debates about “loyalty, independence, and family on which
the valuing of America’s new republican culture depends.” McWilliams
attributes the outspokenness of Cooper’s heroines to the influence
on him of Mary Wollstonecraft and Walter Scott. J. Gerald Ken-
nedy’s “Cooper’s Europe and His Quarrel with America” (pp. 91–122)
contends that Cooper’s years abroad developed his understanding of
nationality and that in Gleanings in Europe he divulged the weakness in
American identity—its “confused, nascent nationalism”—in the hope
of effecting cultural reform. In “Cooper’s Leatherstocking Conversa-
tions: Identity, Friendship, and Democracy in the New Nation” (pp.
123–54) Dana D. Nelson reads Cooper’s characterization of women
and interracial friendships for their “engagement with . . . questions
about democratic identity and interrelation.” The most interesting
(though shrilly written) essay in this collection is Barbara Alice Mann’s
“Race Traitor: Cooper, His Critics, and Nineteenth-Century Literary
Politics” (pp. 155–85), which draws on the three different rules of racial
identity in effect in the early 19th century to argue that Natty Bumppo
was at least half Indian. Mann defends Cooper from today’s charges
of racialism to argue that he was a liberal whose “discourse on mixed

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race . . . marked him as an ‘Indian lover’ and a ‘race traitor’ ” in his
own day, subjecting him to “ferocious attack by the racist right.” Jeffrey
Walker’s bibliographic essay (pp. 215–38) and an illustrated chronology
(pp. 187–213) fill out the volume.
Although its pedagogical focus makes it a footnote here, Jeffrey Walk-
er’s edited collection Reading Cooper, Teaching Cooper (AMS) deserves
mention alongside these other attempts to reverse the decline in Cooper’s
fortunes among contemporary readers. The 19 new essays collected here
consider the novelist in his age and our own, investigating the practices
of 19th-century readers and publishers, Cooper’s relations with other
writers, his changing reception over the years, his narrative techniques,
and his approaches to politics and the landscape as well as to race and
gender. Also devoted to contexts, Peter Schneck’s “The Laws of Fiction:
Legal Rhetoric and Literary Evidence” (EJES 11, i: 47–63) articulates the
relationship between literature and law, discussing the way The Pioneers
invites its readers to judge opposing modes of rhetoric. The novel “both
critiques and legitimizes law and legal authority” by positing literature
as a “form of evidence superior to that of law” (in its freedom from legal
rigidity) but “only if its rhetoric is authored and authorized by law.” Cen-
tral to this reading is a discussion not only of Cooper’s courtroom scene,
where Judge Temple’s plain speech supplants the defending counsel’s
“feeble rhetorical maneuvers,” but also of his will, which is both a legal
and a literary document.
In The Original Knickerbocker: The Life of Washington Irving (Basic)
Andrew Burstein offers a historian’s sense of Irving’s impact on Ameri-
can culture, noting that the writer’s importance for cultural historians
looms even larger than his importance for literary critics. This may or
may not be true—Irving gets uneven coverage here from year to year—
but it’s an understandable claim given that the last significant biography,
Stanley T. Williams’s “demeaning” work of 1935, dismissed Irving as a
superficial sentimentalist. Burstein is interested not in rescuing Irving’s
literary reputation but in illustrating his cultural impact: “Born into a
merchant’s family in a still uncity-like, though not quite sylvan, lower
Manhattan, and unlikely at birth to become an influential citizen of the
world, Washington Irving did, by force of personality, bring important
changes to culture. If, in the current literary canon, he does not have
the prominence he once had, he certainly led one of the most public
lives in the nineteenth century. Nothing about this was commonplace.”
This readable, fast-paced biography takes on Irving’s romantic life, his

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friendships, his politics, his literary relations, and his business interests
as well as his literary works.
Steven Blakemore’s Joel Barlow’s “Columbiad” seeks to make Barlow’s
epic poem more accessible to modern readers. While acknowledging that
“the eyes begin to glaze over in a reading that seems too densely packed
with cultural minutiae seemingly not deserving the effort,” Blakemore
maintains that the Columbiad, “one of the most complex and extraordi-
nary long narrative poems in nineteenth-century American literature,”
is indeed worth the effort of understanding Barlow’s references, and in
more than three hundred pages he works through the poem, glossing
and contextualizing as he goes.
A more successful argument for the importance of an obscure work,
J. Javier Rodríguez’s “The U.S.-Mexican War in James Russell Lowell’s
The Biglow Papers” (ArQ 63, iii: 1–33) calls these verses “Lowell’s most
daring vision, a work that questions national coherence with the U.S.-
Mexican War’s shifting spectral reflections.” In spite of this praise, at
times Rodríguez seems to accuse Lowell (along with most historians of
that war) of being insufficiently critical of Anglo-American exception-
alism. Describing Lowell’s satire as “chaotically poly-vocal, digressive,
parodic, and carnivalesque,” Rodríguez takes readers through the three
personas featured in the work. He extends his reading of Lowell into
an ongoing critique of American imperialism (mentioning the current
war in Iraq as well as the still-militarized U.S.-Mexican border) and
is sometimes more interested in assigning blame than in exploring
the complexities of this text. More’s the pity, since his reading of this
poem—particularly his discussion of its “intense and chaotic” linguistic
activity—is sometimes fascinating.
In “The Pen as Sword: Simms and the Beginning of the War—
Rediscovered Writings from 1861” (Simms Review 15, i: 1–18) Jeffrey J.
Rogers surveys a number of documents from 1861, some attributed to
Simms and mentioned (though not published) in The Letters of Wil-
liam Gilmore Simms and others not definitively identified as written by
him. These essays and letters address the political matters that Simms
regarded as most urgent: about the mode of seceding from the Union,
the kinds of tariffs to be imposed by the new Confederacy, the most
effective means of defending the South Carolina coast, and the respon-
sibilities of southerners who had enlisted in the military before secession.
Rogers demonstrates that Simms, “a man feeling the excitement of the
moment,” turned his writerly energies toward “the birth of a nation

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to which he was already fully devoted,” proving himself not only a

man of imagination but one whose mechanical and political acumen is
established by his practical suggestions for defending the Confederacy.
Matthew C. Brennan describes Simms’s agrarianism as a “Southern
ecology that is both practical and Romantic.” Placing Simms within
a Romantic tradition that includes Wordsworth and Thoreau, Bren-
nan’s “The Nature of Simms’s Southern Ecology” (SCR 39, ii: 52–60)
argues that Simms forged a Southern ecology as “a corrective to mis-
guided modern industrialism.” Surrendering himself to peaceful medi-
tations, Simms’s farmer “will experience the religious pastoralism” of
Wordsworth and Thoreau.

iv  Douglass
Though Frederick Douglass is mentioned in many of the studies of
slavery, only Fionnghuala Sweeney’s Frederick Douglass and the Atlan-
tic World (Liverpool) gives him sustained consideration. Resituating
Douglass within a transatlantic context, Sweeney focuses on Douglass’s
two major overseas tours—one in 1845 to the United Kingdom and the
other in 1886 to Europe and North Africa. In both of these phases, she
argues, Douglass looked to an international context to claim a selfhood
that was both racially hybrid and thoroughly Western and American.
Discussing Douglass’s early public years, Sweeney contends that his first
overseas journey and the British editions of his Narrative reposition that
text “as a forum in which transnational power relations and the struggle
for agency were mediated.” These struggles for agency are evident in
Douglass’s text, where he fashions himself as the self-conscious product
of colonial history and claims a “transnational, hybrid identity.” Noting
in his preface to the Irish Narrative that Great Britain is the land of his
paternal ancestors, Douglass expands the vexed problem of paternity to
an international context, “exceed[ing] contemporary discussions of slav-
ery as a localized American problem.” Sweeney explains how struggles
for agency extended beyond Douglass’s text to suspicions his European
success stirred in his American allies. Sweeney understands Douglass’s
late writings on Ireland and Haiti, written in the wake of his 1886 trav-
els, as continuing his earlier argument that racial hybridity is the key
to economic, social, and racial progress. Touring Egypt as many bour-
geois Americans toured Europe, Douglass celebrated Egyptians as Afro-

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Europeans, thereby embracing and confirming American manhood and

becoming “complicit in a related discourse of U.S. empire.”
Although her topic is fascinating and timely, the scope of Sweeney’s
study is limited by her choice to focus on Douglass’s two major overseas
tours. The last two chapters, devoted to the later journey and Douglass’s
thoughts on race, manhood, and empire, constitute a fascinating contri-
bution to the field. But the early chapters sometimes retread worn criti-
cal paths, arguing, for instance, that the autobiography is a plastic form
that allows the insertion of transnational debates in its appendixes and
wasting themselves on familiar arguments about the famous Narrative.
As a consequence, Sweeney overlooks some of Douglass’s less familiar
writings, including his only attempt at fiction, “The Heroic Slave.” Still,
this book makes a strong and welcome case for the centrality of the
African American to “global modernity.”

v  Stowe and Jacobs

By far the best work on Stowe concerns not her most famous novel
but Dred, which Laura H. Korobkin identifies as the superior novel.
Korobkin’s “Appropriating Law in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Dred” (NCF
62: 380–406) shows how this novel aggressively and explicitly quotes
at length famous legal materials—in particular a state Supreme Court
opinion that was familiar to readers of abolitionist literature—in order
to engage in a debate with the legal and abolitionist establishments.
Powerful and carefully historicized, this essay makes one of the best
cases in recent years for the cultural work of a literary text; Korobkin
illustrates how Stowe “absorb[s], imitate[s], and best[s] the strategies and
the reach of both legal and abolitionist texts” in order to establish “the
power of committed political fiction to act in the world.” As Korobkin
demonstrates, Stowe not only cites the same legal text that abolition-
ists had been citing for years but uses the resources of fiction against
these abolitionists, quoting the opinion at length and placing it at the
center of a dramatic scene, “making it the critical nexus around which
a fully imagined cast of characters and plotlines, antecedent events and
consequences, revolve.” Korobkin deftly analyzes the rhetorical effects
of Stowe’s approach, and in Korobkin’s reading this sentimental novelist
insists that human suffering must be a part of the legal debates about
slavery. Korobkin powerfully demonstrates Stowe’s formal and substan-
tive responsiveness to legal texts while also showing how Dred alters

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the legal texts it appropriates. This essay may well be responsible for
replacing Uncle Tom’s Cabin with Dred on many college syllabi.
The majority of essays on Stowe, however, consider the more famous
novel. In Formalism, Experience, and the Making of American Literature
in the Nineteenth Century, Theo Davis advances the interesting argument
that several American writers including Stowe “conceived of experience
as a domain of hypothetical, typical responses, and that their central
literary project was the evocation and shaping of such typical experi-
ence.” Rather than thinking of experience as by definition subjective,
Davis argues that experience in Stowe’s novel is a function of her text,
generated by its formal features. Stowe’s strategy of constructing experi-
ence is to draw readers close to characters while also highlighting their
distance, but more important, experience in this novel “seems to follow
from schematic situations that are completely reducible to concepts,”
so that conversations read like debates. Davis reads Stowe’s writings
as “moving toward the New Critical model in which the experience
became not just the effect of, but indistinguishable from, the text.” It’s
an intriguing argument that Davis carefully puts in dialogue with the
most important readings of Stowe from the past 25 years.
Contextual readings of Stowe’s famous novel focus on print cul-
ture and adaptation. Jo-Ann Morgan’s “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” as Visual
Culture (Missouri) is an art historian’s analysis of Hammatt Billings’s
“foundational imagery” from the novel’s first two editions and the
“pictorial multiplicities” of subsequent visual representations stretching
beyond the Civil War and addressing various social agendas. Mor-
gan concludes that artists used visual strategies to tame the subversive
potential of Stowe’s novel. Many of these images can be found in the
richly illustrated Annotated “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” ed. Henry Louis Gates
Jr. and Hollis Robbins (Norton). In his introduction, Gates reflects
on the reception the novel received from African American writers
during the Civil Rights era, concluding that these writers failed to
recognize the novel’s “polymorphous sexual energy” to be found “just
barely beneath its blatantly sentimental surface.” In “Slavery in Black
and White: Daguerreotypy and Uncle Tom’s Cabin” (ESQ 52: 157–91)
Marcy J. Dinius argues that Stowe borrowed from the daguerreotype
to establish the veracity of her depiction of slavery while also engaging
her readers’ sympathies. The trope of the daguerreotype, believed to
represent both body and character, enabled Stowe to reunite black affect
and embodiment, which slavery had forcibly isolated.

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Considering adaptation, Claire Parfait’s The Publishing History of

“Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” 1852–2002 (Ashgate) investigates the “intricate”
history of this particular novel’s presentation to successive generations
of Americans, from its serialization to film adaptations, though her pub-
lication focus precludes attention to drama. Les Harrison’s Temple and
Forum fills this void, examining the form in which Stowe’s story found
its largest audience and where, Harrison claims, her cultural authority
was both produced and contested. Harrison considers in impressive
detail the working-class National Theatre’s and the more heterogeneous
American Museum’s stage presentations of Stowe’s story. While the for-
mer, anxious to limit the range of meanings generated by Stowe’s plot,
served up the story as a sermonlike series of static tableaus (representing
the “temple” of Harrison’s title), the latter retained much of the author’s
debate-laden dialogues (the “forum”). Both adaptations waged a battle
over the meaning of Stowe’s novel, however, by normalizing her plot in
ways that corresponded to the “representational practices” of the two
theaters. A chapter in Just Below South looks at theatrical adaptations
to argue that these dramas repeated a gesture of erasure that Stowe
initiated in her novel. Carolyn Vellenga Berman argues in “Imperson-
ating the Creole: The American Family and Its Lines of Flight” (pp.
25–48) that while the novel depends upon French and Spanish Creole
figures to challenge slavery by blurring racial categories, it closes with
the disappearance of the Creole into Anglicized and Protestant norms.
Cassy—whose importance to this story derives from her reminder of
the Louisiana Purchase and interstate slave trade, Caribbean slave revo-
lutions, and French and Spanish colonial practices—challenges racial
norms but is then reinscribed within the same racial categories she had
threatened. Stage adaptations of the novel, Berman argues, downplayed
the Creole Cassy in favor of her Anglicized daughter Eliza.
Mary McCartin Wearn’s detailed and persuasive Negotiating Mother-
hood redirects critical discussions of sentiment and maternity to argue
that while 19th-century sentimental maternal ideology emblematized
“natural morality and social harmony,” it “held darker sway as well,”
undermining female subjectivity and offering writers a target for their
resistance. Wearn’s reading of Uncle Tom’s Cabin sets the terms for her
study: Stowe’s novel, she asserts, leaves female subjectivity to pay for the
political gains of Stowe’s maternal idealism. Later chapters consider how
other American writers “build on, resist, or revise the ideality of senti-
mental motherhood that Stowe’s text so elegantly illustrates.” If Stowe’s

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novel reveals the ways that “women are regulated through the maternal
role” (an insight borne out in Stowe’s complicated relationship to her
own role as a mother), Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
takes more explicit aim at this role, forcefully demonstrating how “the
conventional maternal values that bind one to family can actually serve
as a force of oppression.” As Wearn persuasively shows, the sentimental
claims for motherhood in this text are all made by characters whose
“rigid sexual mores” threaten the self-determination that the narrator
claims as her own rhetorical ground.
Mark Rifkin’s dense and original “ ‘A Home Made Sacred by Protect-
ing Laws’: Black Activist Homemaking and Geographies of Citizenship
in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl ” (Differences 18, ii: 72–102) is one of
the best essays published this year, certainly the best on Jacobs. Urging
us to read Incidents as political theory, Rifkin makes a compelling case
by showing how Jacobs conjoins domestic scenes with national policy.
The effect, he argues, is to show how the ordinary circumstances of pri-
vate life are determined by “the often abstract principles and seemingly
distant [though specific] practices of national governance.” Jacobs’s focus
on domestic life as opposed to patriarchal black sacrifice allows her to
include women in her “countercartography of citizenship.” Rifkin’s com-
plex argument draws on careful readings of Incidents as well as historical
contexts, including the 1857 Dred Scott decision and documents from
the Colored National Convention.
The gimlet that Jacobs uses to pierce through her garret wall pro-
vides Daneen Wardrop with a metaphor for the fugitive slave’s pointed,
outwardly directed, and enlightening writing. Wardrop’s “ ‘I Stuck the
Gimlet in and Waited for Evening’: Writing and Incidents in the Life of
a Slave Girl” (TSLL 49: 209–29) examines scenes of writing in the nar-
rative and argues that while her literacy makes her vulnerable to white
cruelty, Jacobs masters a new, defiant kind of writing after she discovers
the gimlet. For Grace McEntee, Jacobs’s rhetorical tool is motherhood:
“The Ethos of Motherhood and Harriet Jacobs’s Vision of Racial Equal-
ity in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl,” pp. 200–223 in Susan C. Staub,
ed., The Literary Mother: Essays on Representations of Maternity and Child
Care (McFarland), maintains that Incidents advances the hope that
motherly affection can overcome racism and change national culture.

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vi  Women Writers

Apart from Stowe, attention to women writers is spread among a number
of authors, with no one enjoying prominence, though Susan Fenimore
Cooper draws more notice this year than in the past. Tina Gianquitto’s
“Good Observers of Nature” explores the “linguistic, perceptual, and sci-
entific systems” that women used to describe their experiences of nature.
Pushing beyond the pious and sentimental flower language books of
the age, Gianquitto investigates how the works of four women drew on
scientific developments from the Enlightenment to the beginning of evo-
lutionary biology in the women’s representations of the natural world.
Two writers concern us: Almira Phelps, whose 1829 Familiar Lectures on
Botany used Lockean empiricism to encourage girls to study the natural
world, and Susan Fenimore Cooper, whose 1850 Rural Hours relied on
various comparative scientists to challenge readers to rethink how they
saw this same world. Gianquitto’s book is both an intellectual and a
cultural history, tracing scientific developments as well as the cultural
designs of these nature writings.
In “Land Claims, Natives, and Nativism: Susan Fenimore Cooper’s
Fealty to Place” (AL 79: 475–500) Stephen Germic reads Rural Hours
as a continuation of the anxieties over titles and status that Cooper
inherited from her father and grandfather. Cooper’s reflections on the
changing ecosystem of the Cooperstown area, Germic argues, reveal
her worries about losing her place to the claims of native people and
European immigrants. While Germic’s tone is sometimes smug (“the
only present Indian, it seems, is a dead Indian”), he makes a striking case
that Cooper’s writings about natural history are permeated with nativist
sentiments, and his essay therefore helps us to see Cooper as something
more than an environmental writer.
Jennifer Bernhardt Steadman examines the unconventional travel
writings of lesser-known women writers in Traveling Economies. While
scholars of the period tend to recognize genteel women travelers, Stead-
man calls our attention to writers whose “vision of women’s mobility,
autonomy, and competence” threatened cultural norms of the day. Her
subjects all traveled for work, not leisure, and used travel as a means
of “subvert[ing] and reconstruct[ing] systems of power that depend
on women’s exploitation and stasis.” In her readings of the private and
public travel narratives of Amy Morris Bradley, Nancy Prince, Anne
Royall, Mary Ann Shadd Cary, Frances Wright, and Julia Archibald

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Holmes, Steadman considers the values these women advocated and the
difficulties they endured for doing so. In Fanny Kemble: A Performed Life
(Penn.), a meticulous biography of another working woman, Deirdre
David tells the story of this English-born actress whose American writ-
ings warrant her a place here. David’s approach is that of “a feminist
critic alert to [her] subject’s resistance to prescribed nineteenth-century
codes for women’s lives,” as when she notes that Kemble’s experiences
with theater, romance, and financial difficulties “enabled the develop-
ment of a political voice” that she raised in the United States to “articu-
late feminist positions that hitherto had been expressed primarily in
the realm of her private life.” Readers of these pages will be particularly
interested in what Kemble called her “dreary lesson of human suffer-
ing”: the years of her unhappy marriage and her bitter experiences on
her husband’s Georgia plantation.

vii  Native American Writers

Cultural convergences dominate work on indigenous writers. The best of
these, Phillip H. Round’s discussion of the union of print culture with
native pictorial representation, takes issue with Walter Benjamin’s con-
tention that mechanical reproduction frees art from its “parasitic subser-
vience to ritual.” In “Indigenous Illustration: Native American Artists
and Nineteenth-Century Print Culture” (AmLH 19: 267–89) Round
considers the drawings of the Kiowa Silver Horn and more thoroughly
the Iroquois artist David Cusick, whose sketches of Iroquois history
were published in 1848. Finding these illustrations neither primitive nor
modern, Round discusses them as “bicultural representational practices”
prompted by the desire to preserve native traditions and extend them
to a larger audience by means of a growing print culture, where old
traditions appeared new to native and nonnative readers alike. Round’s
essay is followed by Robert Dale Parker’s excellent response (“The Hum
of Routine: Issues for the Study of Early American Print Culture,” pp.
290–96), which dwells in more detail on one of the images Round dis-
cusses, explaining the illustration as part of Iroquois myth and describ-
ing the artist’s aesthetic choices. Parker’s response is as welcome for the
careful if brief attention it pays to the image as it is for his warning that
the “standard critical problem of resistance and agency” overlooks other
intriguing features of literature and culture that critics once cared about.

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Kendall Johnson draws on the history of peace medals to argue that

the apparently conciliatory conclusion to Black Hawk’s autobiography
might be read ironically. “Peace, Friendship, and Financial Panic: Read-
ing the Mark of Black Hawk in Life of Ma-Ka-Tai-Me-She-Kia-Kiak”
(AmLH 19: 771–99) notes that Black Hawk, who refused to accept or
wear a peace medal, had good reasons for his resolve. While these medals
celebrated “peace and friendship,” Black Hawk recognized the falsity of
American promises to protect indigenous people; as Johnson argues, in
Black Hawk’s depiction, peace medals “outline the rhetorical pattern of
marking peace with Indians in the act of dispossessing them.” Johnson’s
essay focuses on the political and economic context of the 1830s and
suggests that the misrepresentation of these medals was only one symp-
tom of a dishonest administration whose currency policies triggered
a financial panic that plunged the country into depression, inflicting
damage on the wider population that ran parallel to the damage of
Indian removal. William Apess’s autobiography gets brief consideration
in Zoe Trodd’s essay “Hybrid Constructions: Native Autobiography and
the Open Curves of Cultural Hybridity” (Reconstructing Hybridity, pp.
139–61). Noting that colonial theorists often ignore dialogic exchanges
in their zeal to find either resistance to or absorption in colonial efforts,
Trodd reads A Son of the Forest as revealing “a borderland of hybridity,”
where Apess imitates white voices, “appropriates spectatorial represen-
tations of Native Americans,” and scatters various narrative forms into
the autobiography that is too often read, Trodd claims, as a pure heir to
the tradition of Christian narratives. What emerges “from the Native-
white cultural encounter” of Apess’s autobiography, Trodd contends, is
a “hybrid, relational self.”
University of Georgia

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