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Hemispheric Regionalism
 Imagining the Americas
Caroline F. Levander and Anthony B. Pinn, Series Editors

Millennial Literatures of the Americas, 1492‒2002

Thomas O. Beebee
The Plantation in the Postslavery Imagination
Elizabeth Christine Russ
The Interethnic Imagination
Caroline Rody
Religious Liberties
Elizabeth Fenton
Between the Lines
Monique-​Adelle Callahan
God’s Arbiters
Susan K. Harris
Tragic Soul-​Life
Terrence Johnson
The Unsettlement of America
Anna Brickhouse
Hemispheric Regionalism
Gretchen Woertendyke
 Hemispheric Regionalism
Romance and the Geography of Genre

Gretchen J. Woertendyke

1
 1
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers
the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education
by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University
Press in the UK and certain other countries.

Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press

198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America.

© Oxford University Press 2016

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in

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rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the
above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the
address above.

You must not circulate this work in any other form

and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer.

CIP data is on file at the Library of Congress

ISBN 978–0–19–021227–8

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed by Sheridan, USA
For Isabelle, Owen, and Gabriel
And for Tony
 { Contents }

Acknowledgments ix
Introduction: Geography and Genre 1

Part I Specters of Haiti and Gothic Romance

1. Fugitive Slave Narratives and Atlantic Conspiracies 21
2. “The Sea Is History”: Apocalypse and the New World Romance 47

Part II The “Boulevard of the New World” and

the Work of Popular Romance
3. Popular Histories and Serious Fictions: Manifest Destiny and
the Spanish Atlantic World 77
4. Maturin M. Ballou, Periodical Romance,
and the Editor Function 97

Part III Historical Romance and the New National Novel

5. Nation and Regionalism in Walter Scott and
James Fenimore Cooper 121
Coda: Hyperbolic Regionalism, Confederate Nationalism, and
the New Southern Frontier 141

Notes 155
Bibliography 185
Index 199
 { Acknowledgments }

So many people go into the production of a book that it is difficult to know

where to begin. My deep thanks go to the American Council of Learned
Societies for a 2010 Research Fellowship, which not only allowed me to
work at an early stage of the project, but also as important, gave me much
needed confidence to finish it. Thanks also to the Huntington Library for a
Mayers Fellowship and uninterrupted access to its amazing community of
scholars and resources. I am especially grateful to Caroline Levander who
seemed to have faith in the project even as I struggled to fully articulate its
central concerns—​and to her co-​editor of the Imagining the Americas Series,
Anthony Pinn. The editors and production staff at Oxford University Press
were unfailingly patient and insightful, I cannot thank Brendan O’Neil,
Stephen Bradley, Alphonsa James, and Lynn Childress enough. Thanks, too,
to the external readers of the manuscript—​their terrific responses made vis-
ible aspects of the project I had long lost the ability to see. Thanks to Susan
Scheckel and Eric Haralson who guided my dissertation, and to Bob Levine
for acting as the external reader. I presented several iterations of the project
throughout the years and a few critiques remained with me throughout the
revision process. Thanks to Hester Blum, Rodrigo Lazo, Andy Doolen, Ruth
Hill, Monique Allewaert, Marlene Daut Faka, Elizabeth Maddock Dillon,
Shelley Streeby, Emily Garcia, and Michelle Burnham for challenging me
to rethink my terms. Participants at “Hemispheric Encounters: The Early
United States in a Transnational Perspective” at the University of Leipzig were
extremely helpful in the concluding phases of the book—​thanks to Gabriele
Pisarz-​Ramirez, Markus Heide, Kirsten Silva Gruesz, Raùl Coronado, and
Michael Drexler. Kirsten Silva Gruesz and Anna Brickhouse brought together
a talented group of scholars for a Hemispheric Seminar at C19. I am one of
many to benefit from their immense generosity and intellect. Earlier versions
of sections from various chapters in this book appeared in Early American
Literature, Atlantic Studies, and in Journeys of the Slave Narrative in the Early
Americas, edited by Nicole Aljoe and Ian Finesth.
I am lucky to work with creative and smart colleagues at University of South
Carolina. Thanks to Bill Rivers and Nina Levine, whose support enables junior
faculty to remain focused, and to Dean Mary Ann Fitzpatrick for appointing
me a Bonnie and Peter McCausland Faculty Fellow of English Language and
Literature. Several colleagues have read or listened to parts of the project,
xAcknowledgments

thanks to Debra Rae Cohen, Qiana Whitted, Bob Brinkmeyer, Greg Forter,
Susan Courtney, Danielle Coriale, Elise Blackwell, David Bajo, Rebecca Stern,
Catherine Keyser, David Shields, Leon Jackson, John Muckelbauer, Tommy
Crocker, and Holly Crocker. Different writing groups were crucial to my san-
ity at various moments, thanks to Kelly Wisecup and Maria Windell, I hope
you know how essential you were during that revision. I could not have sur-
vived the last six years without the friendship of and many meetings with
Brian Glavey and Anne Gulick. And finally I thank my family: my parents,
Kathryn Gallagher, Robert Woertendyke, and Ellen Woertendyke for being
supportive even when doubtful, and for instilling early in childhood a love
for language and art. Thank you to my in-​laws, Mary and Norman Jarrells,
who have helped our family in too many ways to count. As I write this, my
mother is struggling against cancer—​I am grateful for every moment with
her. My children, Isabelle, Owen, and Gabe, are simply everything. And to
Tony Jarrells, who reads all of the bad versions graciously, and shares in all of
the chaos and joy. Thank you for always making me laugh.
Hemispheric Regionalism
 Introduction
Geography and Genre

At the peak of his success in 1853, Frederick Gleason was earning $50,000 a
year from his story paper, The Flag of Our Union (1846), and illustrated news-
paper, Gleason’s Pictorial Drawing Room Companion (1851). His Boston “fic-
tion factory” was the first in which the entire publication process took place
under one roof, making Gleason’s Publishing Hall the top publisher of fiction
in the United States between 1837 and 1857. Gleason’s cheap romance fiction
ran between 50 and 125 pages and cost anywhere between 12.5 and 25 cents.1
Nearly all of these, and a large portion of the over 2,000 titles published in
this twenty-​year period, feature settings in and around the Atlantic world, the
outposts of imperial Spain and France, and the southern coast of the United
States. Writers capitalized on the adventure associated with a maritime world
populated by outliers, outlaws, and slaves traveling between coastal South
Carolina, Florida, Havana, and the Caribbean. For Gleason, tales of vice led
to virtue and did so best when represented by the exciting exploits of Byronic
heroes.2 Romance, the most popular and widely published fictional form in
the period, allowed writers and readers to consider the unique geographic
conditions of the United States, those in which Old World religious, political,
and social mores coexisted uneasily within a New World environment. With
The Flag of Our Union, Gleason could exploit the uncertainty about what
separated and conjoined the United States and other nations across the hemi-
sphere and create an enormous market for popular fiction in the process.3
The Flag of Our Union published these romances alongside news of and
opinions about the nation’s future connection with Cuba, Mexico, and
Haiti, as if to underline the associations readers would inevitably develop. In
works such as Maturin Ballou’s Fanny Campbell, the Female Pirate Captain,
J. H. Ingraham’s Lafitte, Pirate of the Gulf, and James Fenimore Cooper’s
nautical tales, The Pilot and Red Rover, Old World histories intermix with
New World geographies. The adventures of pirates and sea captains veil
2Introduction

anxieties about the future of the United States. This is the archive Hemispheric
Regionalism: Romance and the Geography of Genre highlights and accounts
for, asking as it does why extra-​national regions were so important in the
early national period and why romance in particular is especially adept at
representing the uncertainty that such regional relations produced.
Romance is imaginative and versatile, which made it attractive to writers
struggling to survive in an increasingly competitive literary marketplace. The
features that made romance so entertaining to readers—​fantasy, adventure,
allegory, and terror—​offered writers’ ways of making their contemporary
time and place legible. In the United States, this flexibility made it a vital lit-
erary form, providing writers such as Charles Brockden Brown with tools for
amplifying history and for representing the particular geography of the New
World. The newness of the nation and dynamic relations across the region
helped to generate self-​consciousness about what literature more broadly was
meant to do and what defined it as such. This self-​consciousness remains
one of the genre’s defining characteristics. A kind of border fiction, romance
could range beyond the nation and move back and forth in time. In a period
of shifting allegiances and overall instability, the romance thrived upon the
danger and possibility that spaces beyond and outside borders, whether psy-
chological, metaphysical, historical, or geographic, evoked.
This book, then, is a study about romance—​how it evolves, what kind of
cultural work it performs, and why it remains the dominant form of fiction
throughout the long nineteenth century in the United States. It understands
romance as a critical index of cultural transformation in the nineteenth cen-
tury, made possible because of the genre’s formal and conceptual potential-
ity, mobility, and speculation. Hemispheric Regionalism marks the relations
between various geographies and histories, apart from that of the nation, but
more broadly it signals a way of reading attentive to literary forms that have
remained unacknowledged or underrepresented. This lack of recognition has
produced skewed US literary histories of the long nineteenth century—​what
remains outside, apart, or in excess is the popular. The immense popularity
of the works I examine in this study suggests that readers from various back-
grounds, literacy levels, and socioeconomic groups all found something in
romance that made a conception of past, present, and future possible. Rather
than understanding the popular as a reflection of specific socioeconomic or
political events, Hemispheric Regionalism argues instead that romance intro-
duces a way of reading relations between competing scales, which not only
reflects the complex conditions of the period but also can account for the
genre’s dominance and popularity.
This book, too, is a study of “hemispheric regionalism,” a term I use to refer
to these multiple scales of geography and history in dynamic relation, rather
than as a static space against which either hemisphere or region gets defined.
Hemispheric regionalism underscores the provincialism of the regional, as
Introduction 3

well as regional responsiveness to the hemisphere. Region in my study is not

one part of the greater national whole, but a series of connections between
loosely configured areas and spaces adjacent to the southern frontier.4 These
connections shape cultural production in the antebellum United States and
make possible a burgeoning sense of the nation in the years immediately sur-
rounding the Civil War. Regionalism, then, refers to an alternative set of rela-
tions within the broader categories of nation and hemisphere, relations that
illuminate a familiarity, even intimacy, within a particular region but one
equally open to, and aware of, what lies beyond the nation’s borders.
The “hemispheric” I argue is an integral characteristic of regionalism(s);
it signals the economic and sociopolitical forces of territory just outside
national borders. These territories include those directly adjacent and most
closely impacted by US expansion and policy, such as Cuba and Mexico, but
also the waterways upon which Atlantic traffic from the West Indies, and all
regions touched by the slave trade, travel. These waterways and borders con-
nect national, regional, and hemispheric places, but they are also conceptual,
mobile, and contested categories. The works I examine in this study share an
idea of place and history, an often ambiguous sense of what exists across bor-
ders, and an idea of what constitutes a surrounding territory.
This study explores an anxiety over geographic space and shifting regional
affiliations reflected in writing of the long nineteenth century; but “hemi-
spheric regionalism” refers to how romance represents the relationship
between geography and history. The expansive geography of the New World,
and the potential it represented for the future of the United States, stands
in stark contrast to the nation’s shallow historical past. In romance, writers
could activate this geographic breadth in order to compensate for the nation’s
short history; romance appropriates an expansive geography and recodes it as
historical depth, one in which the self-​consciousness about historical absence,
and the sophisticated entanglements of the hemisphere, are integral features
of its form. In this way the work of US romance is profound, interpreting the
dizzying transformations of the period across territories and making con-
nections between regions, which are both internal to the nation and scat-
tered throughout the hemisphere. In its popular, gothic, and historical forms,
romance worked for writers and readers from the laboring to the elite classes,
from rural to urban settings, and from northern to southern states.
To understand how the genre manipulates an expansive geography is to
recognize it as a future-​oriented form, one in which the competing strains of
imperial expansion and xenophobic retraction, combine. European romance
is frequently characterized as a conveyor of conjectural history, the telling of
a past that explains the present; but the US romance looks to an imaginary
future in order to animate the present and substitute for a historical past.5
The form’s futurity underscores the urgency of the present, one rich with pos-
sibility but also threatened by French, British, and Spanish imperial contests
4Introduction

throughout the hemisphere. The capacious sense of time is conjoined to an

expanded sense of space; it is the perceived lack of historical depth which
requires compensation, one only the interrelations of hemispheric channels
can supply. Geography, thus, produces a historical depth: the kind of depth
that regionalist writers, such as Edgar Allan Poe, William Gilmore Simms,
and J. H. Ingraham, for example, bring to local sites is one in which hemi-
spheric relations are already fully enmeshed. What lies outside the borders
of the nation represents the future, even as it imaginatively maps a history
of the United States. In its capacity to work synchronically and diachron-
ically at once, transforming vast geographic space into a deep historical
time, romance offered imaginative solutions to pressing problems haunting
the nation. In Hemispheric Regionalism, the nation, and subsequent literary
nationalism, is understood as an effect of the very hemispheric regionalism
the romance features.

Romance–​Novel

Hemispheric Regionalism not only draws upon and expands foundational

scholarship on romance and US literary history but also seeks to redress a
few of the limitations that remain a part of US literary historiography to the
present. Romance has a long critical history in American literary studies as
the first fully imaginative genre to transform the materials of history into
national myth. Richard Chase identifies in romance, “a certain intrepid and
penetrating dialectic of action and meaning, a radical skepticism about ulti-
mate questions” and what Herman Melville understood as “the blackness of
darkness.” Romance occupies “that farther realm of fiction” but is rendered
meaningful by a “local significance”—​the sense to which it remains a part of
a specific time and place. And as I have been suggesting, it is in the intersect-
ing realms of geographic and temporal space that US romance registered so
profoundly for writers and readers in the long nineteenth century.6
Understood as a “native tradition of the Novel” but also one in which “its
most original and characteristic form … worked out its destiny,” the genre of
romance has always elicited confusion about what defines it, and even about
whether it is a genre in the first place.7 In US literary criticism, definitions,
descriptions, and examples of romance became intricately connected with
establishing a uniquely national “novel” tradition: for critics, such as Richard
Chase and F. O. Matthiessen among others, romance was the type of novel
re-​domesticated from Britain, in which the features of a national landscape
and history provided thematic and formal structure.8 Critics of the British
form, too, take romance to be a variant of the novel: Catherine Gallagher’s
“The Rise of Fictionality” (2006) and Ian Duncan’s Modern Romance and the
Transformation of the Novel (1992), both attribute the novel’s status as fiction
Introduction 5

to the romance. And Leslie Fiedler argues that the term “romance” only
serves to repeat the “rationalizations of the writers themselves.”9
But that writers frequently attached “romance” to their longer fictional
works, a designation inextricably linked to both the literary market and the
literary critic, requires more careful consideration if we are to understand the
form’s function in nineteenth-​century life and in US literary history. An old
and versatile form of fiction, its rise and dominance are especially curious
within the new nation. It is in the genre’s self-​conscious expression of history,
I argue, that romance becomes such a pervasive form of fiction in the United
States. The genre seems to announce a readership, underscoring a purchase
in the literary marketplace through a readily accessible style and far-​ranging
mobility across states. Romance seems also to announce something distinc-
tive from the novel, a recognizable form by the mid-​nineteenth century;
perhaps most important, though: romance announces. It is an acutely self-​
conscious genre. Romance registers its own distance from, or proximity to,
the verisimilitude of the novel and allows writers a geographic breadth and
historical depth not possible in the novel. In its modern form, “[r]‌omance
reproduces itself as the figure of mediation and synthesis by turning contra-
diction into ambiguity,” gravitating between historical facts and imaginative
fantasy.10
It is, then, unsurprising that writers frequently turned to romance as
the most likely to be published and provide income; but writers also recog-
nized its versatility and potential for reflection. In a letter to his publisher,
John Murray, Melville professes his boredom with “narrative[s]‌of facts”
that typifies Typee (1846) and Omoo (1847) and his “longing” for more cre-
ative freedom. “I went to work heart & soul at a romance,” he announces to
Murray in 1848, in preparation for his greatest romance, Moby-​Dick (1851).11
But many other writers thought romance the more plodding and restrictive
genre, even though one far more likely to get published. Writers hoped to
capitalize upon the buoyant market for popular fiction in the late eighteenth
to mid-​nineteenth century, while manipulating the ambiguous and often
fluid boundaries between fiction and history found across various forms of
print. Hemispheric Regionalism reads the genre as distinctive, in part, because
“romance” was the term so many writers used to describe and define their
own work, but also because romance continued to develop features that kept
it alive in an early US system of genres, and kept it somewhat different from
the novel, too. Perhaps more than any of romance’s features, though, it is the
self-​consciousness of history and its unique manipulation of geography that
signals the genre as something apart from the novel’s consolidating impulse
and gestures toward narrative seamlessness.
So why romance? And how is it not the novel? These are difficult questions
to answer, in part, because of a long history of identifying “romance” and
“novel” interchangeably, even as George Dekker notes, “each has so long been
6Introduction

used as each other’s foil and ideal opposite.”12 So I will begin with Fredric
Jameson, who writes, “[T]‌he history of the novel is inevitably the history of
the realist novel.”13 This is in no small measure the result of Ian Watt’s The Rise
of the Novel, in which he argues that the epistemological problem of “realism”
produced the conditions out of which the “novel” emerged. Moreover, Watt’s
study underscores the relationship between these conditions—​the Lockean
understanding that knowledge comes out of sensory experiences, the shift
from collective understanding to the particularity of individual experience—​
and the innovations of the novel form. For Watt, the novel’s realism is not to
be found in everyday, common experiences of the average person, but in the
way such experiences are represented. Writers such as Daniel Defoe, Henry
Fielding, and Samuel Richardson certainly understood what they were doing
to be something new. These writers labored to disassociate their fiction from
the flights of fancy not to be found in “nature,” that signaled romance. This
investment in producing something new and apart from more traditional
romance is both assumed as an important precursor to the rise of the novel
and is simultaneously disavowed in critical histories.
The history of the novel and theories of the novel form have subsumed
all other forms of fiction, which has made it possible to overlook the distinc-
tive work and alternative archives of romance. The works I examine in this
study almost all emerge after the so-​called rise of the novel and its formal
innovations are recognizable in romance-​after-​novel. Perhaps this is why
criticism has largely replicated the practice of reading romance and novel as
interchangeable, or romance as derivative of the novel form. The dominance
of the novel, a “sovereign genre” since the eighteenth century, has under-
written much of literary history. “There is a curious resemblance,” Wai Chee
Dimock writes, “between the totalizing zeal of the theorist and the totalizing
claim being made on behalf of its object.”14 But an authentic literary history
needs more flexibility. This history means tracing associations, connections,
and networks; something irreducible to systems, something more like con-
nection of relational threads, “weak” theory. Such a literary history would
allow us to see the fractal relations of region, nation, hemisphere—​and the
sea. Hemispheric Regionalism works to correct the stories we repeat of the
novel’s rise, centrality, and suppression of other fictional forms. My readings
focus intensely on romance, in part, to compensate for scholarly practice that
maintains the novel’s position in literary history; but even more, to render
the fantastic sensibilities of romance, and the cultural work its performs, vis-
ible. I am less interested in convincing once and for all that “romance” is
something entirely separate from “novel” than in illustrating what we lose
by so fully omitting romance from our history of US fiction. This story of
romance, then, offers a critical provocation as much as it aims to provide a
fuller picture of US life and literature in the nineteenth century.15 In bend-
ing the reed sharply, my hope is to make possible a more balanced history
Introduction 7

of fictional forms in the period, even while I recognize that my own skewed
history invites, and necessitates, counter-​narratives.

Romance

Nineteenth-​century US writers understood romance as something distinc-

tive even when such distinctions seemed, in some measure, to overlap with
novelistic fiction. Henry James writes in his 1903 Preface to the New York edi-
tion of The American, about the history of genre in order to explain the clash
of Old and New World mores in romance and the novel. He writes:
There have been, I gather, many definitions of romance, as a matter indis-
pensably of boats, or of caravans, or of tigers, or of “historical characters,”
or of ghosts, or of forgers, or of detectives, or of beautiful wicked women,
or of pistols and knives, but they appear for the most part reducible to the
idea of the facing of danger, the acceptance of great risks for the fascina-
tion, the very love, of their uncertainty, the joy of success if possible and of
battle in any case.
The list might be used to characterize the sort of cheap pamphlet romances
so popular in the nineteenth century, those that James would not, however,
recognize as romance. For James, extravagant plots by “no means cover the
true ground.” He warns against definitions of romance merely as a difference
in degree, rather than in kind, a mistake that frequently occurs when identi-
fying romance by the temperament of a character. “It would be impossible to
have a more romantic temper than Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, and yet noth-
ing less resembles a romance than the record of her adventures.” Finally, he
offers a working theory:
The only general attribute of projected romance that I can see, the only
one that fits all its cases, is the fact of the kind of experience with which
it deals—​experience liberated, so to speak; experience disengaged, disem-
broiled, disencumbered, exempt from the conditions that we usually know
to attach to it. . . . [t]‌he balloon of experience is in fact of course tied to the
earth, and under that necessity we swing, thanks to a rope of remarkable
length, in the more or less commodious car of the imagination; but it is by
the rope we know where we are, and from the moment that cable is cut we
are large and unrelated . . . the art of the romancer is, “for the fun of it,”
insidiously to cut the cable, to cut it without our detecting him.16
James defines the ideal form of romance, which for him was more psy-
chological and reflective; the “problem of form as an essential theme” can
be found in James’s stylization, his attention to surfaces.17 In the popular
romances of the earlier nineteenth century, however, the cable is frequently
8Introduction

cut without any attempt to hide the gesture. For James as it was for Lionel
Trilling, Chase, and Matthiessen, romance produced and maintained a mar-
ket for “trash” and resisted change until writers such as Washington Irving
and Nathaniel Hawthorne created a “neutral territory, somewhere between
the real world and fairy-​land, where the Actual and the Imaginary may meet,
and each imbue itself with the nature of the other.”18
Hawthorne’s elevation of romance as the more significant literary form is
echoed by Northrup Frye’s judgment against the “sloppy habit of identifying
fiction” with the novel, rather than as one of many “form[s]‌of fiction.” For
Frye romance is a “revolutionary form”; like the epic, it does not require a sta-
ble backdrop, but rather “life itself” becomes the central figure around which
characters cohere, disband, and act.19 The impurity of genre where “any mod-
ern romance” is considered a novel is the product of literary markets: “the
popular demand in fiction,” according to Frye, “is always for a mixed form.”20
The measure between romance and novel, though, becomes a difference in
kind for Frye rather than degree through the theory of history each genre
implies.21 Free from the “alliance of time and Western man,” those attributes
that have “confined the novel,” there is something about its relationship to
history, time, and geographic mobility, which marks a romance as something
apart. Acknowledging the much older form as a worldwide phenomenon
offers a way of grasping its transformation over time through what Jameson
describes as “sedimentation.”22 For Jameson, romance “offer[s] the possibility
of sensing other historical rhythms”; and is “precisely that form in which the
worldness of world reveals or manifest itself.”23
The internal dynamics of US romance, the intermixing of Old World his-
tory and geography within the New World form, express time as layered, or
what Jameson calls a form of sedimentation. In turning to the ways romance
negotiates, then represents, geography, Hemispheric Regionalism works syn-
chronically, conjoining the unique conflicts over time and space that US
writers and readers confronted in the nineteenth century. Read alongside the
formal features present throughout the longue dureé of romance, local econo-
mies, regional connections, and the expansive associations that reach beyond
the United States become central to the history of fictional forms. Geography
and the influence of the broader region on US literature come to the surface,
in part, by tracing what travels between spaces. One form of traffic, but one
especially suited to represent the mobility, volatility, and instability shaping
the nineteenth-​century US‒Atlantic world, is romance: it is popular and is
what circulates and reinforces the connections between the United States,
Cuba, and Haiti.24
Tracing the tensions that arise when such disparate histories and cul-
tures collide suggests that regionalist writing emerged long before the late
nineteenth-​century local color movement, but also, that regionalism resem-
bles more a “deep locality” than a fixed place of disconnection.25 In defining
Introduction 9

his practice, Douglas Reichert Powell argues that “regionalism, despite tra-
ditionally being used to describe, define, and isolate networks of places and
spaces, can provide a rhetorical basis for making claims about how spaces and
places are connected to spatially and conceptually broader patterns of mean-
ing.”26 I want to suggest that literary form can provide a laboratory for locating
such broader patterns of meaning that result from the connections between
places and spaces. Rather than understanding regionalism as space in isola-
tion, Powell’s critical regionalism and by extension hemispheric regionalism,
brings the overwhelming array of scales and tensions across place and space
into view. The patterns among these larger scales of region within the borders
of the United States, but also without the southernmost reaches of the West
Indies, register in romance as networks of connections. Genre more broadly,
and romance more particularly, fixes one variable through which some of
these tensions and networks, and the various sociopolitical, economic, and
geographic spaces they conjoin, alter the stories we tell of literature and his-
tory in the period.

Hemispheric Regionalism

In this book, I recognize the provisional and problematic category of “hemi-

sphere” as an “unavoidable compromise.” Michael Dash describes a New
World perspective as a tenuous shift in focus, necessary for understanding
something like a “regional imagination” across many nations, languages, and
histories that make up the archipelago or American Mediterranean.27 This
project shares the sense of provisional and imaginative mapping of space that
moves between and among institutional and epistemological categories. In
explaining his hopes for The Other America: Caribbean Literature in a New
World Context, Dash writes, “A New World perspective is not the product of a
polarizing, exclusivist politics or an attempt to create a new cultural enclave,
but rather concerns itself with establishing new connections, not only among
the islands of the archipelago but also exploring the region in terms of the
Césairean image of that frail, delicate umbilical cord that holds the Americas
together.”28 Hemispheric Regionalism participates in this evolving project
to understand this cluster of interconnecting sites and their impact on lit-
erature. The impact of a shared yet shifting geography is rich in imaginative
resonance; literature registers, responds to, and ultimately changes in rela-
tion to the complex environment of the New World. Identifying the ruptures
and connections between sites of common interest produces new ways of
understanding geographic and historic scale, which Dash and others have
made available to critics.29 Tracing hemispheric overlap in romance, which
registers movement across time and space, advances a regional and relational
literary history. Romance reflects movement across the New World, stages
10Introduction

the dynamic relations of hemisphere alongside multiple local regions, and

becomes remarkably influential in inculcating a sense of New World citizenry
across an exceedingly varied population of readers.
Although many eighteenth-​and nineteenth-​century writers, readers, and
politicians struggled to define and proliferate the “nation” as a coherent, sta-
ble, and fixed idea; “nation” was always relational to structures of empire,
Spanish, French, and British, and especially contingent upon its relation to
post/​colonial outposts such as Cuba and Haiti. Caribbean writer and theorist
Édouard Glissant explains this relationship between locality and globality as
a “poetics of relation” knowable through depth, structure, and the language
of literature itself, as a way of understanding modernity. “The cultures of the
world have always maintained relations among themselves that were close
or active to varying degrees,” he writes, “but it is only in modern times that
some of the right conditions came together to speed up the nature of these
connections.”30 Glissant here stresses the quality and substance of the con-
nections, understood as historically contingent, and especially legible in the
poetics of literary forms, their depths, structures, and languages.
Bruno Latour’s description of the relationship between different scales—​
social, global, and local—​provides another model for understanding geogra-
phy and genre relationally. “Society is not the whole ‘in which’ everything is
embedded,” Latour claims, “but what travels ‘through’ everything, calibrat-
ing connections and offering every entity it reaches some possibility of com-
mensurability.”31 Romance makes this commensurability visible; it maintains
the unevenness of its parts through a form of calibration, unlike the novel’s
distillation and consolidation of parts into a totalizing, national, vision. The
genre maintains a poetics of relation both on its surface and within its deeper
structures of language and history. As such, it becomes a way of talking about
the expansive, extra-​and international territory that marks cultural, geopo-
litical, and early US aesthetics.
Literary form comes to resemble the ship as one site through which the
messiness of intercultural‒extranational exchange crystalizes. Since Paul
Gilroy first urged critics to take the Atlantic as “one single complex unit of
analysis,” and to challenge Euro-​Anglo-​white models of history with a “coun-
ter cultural modernity,” methods, archives, and geographies continue to be
redrawn.32 Gilroy’s attention to ships as units that embody multiple coordi-
nates of the Atlantic world challenges us to rethink the ways we make sense of
modernity and its impact on cultural productions. His definition and elabo-
ration of the ship’s function is worth noting at length:
[S]‌hips were the living means by which the points within that Atlantic world
were joined. They were mobile elements that stood for the shifting spaces in
between the fixed places that they connected. Accordingly they need to be
thought of as cultural and political units rather than abstract embodiments
Introduction 11

of the triangular trade. They were something more—​a means to conduct

political dissent and possibly a distinct mode of cultural production. The
ship provides a chance to explore the articulations between the discontinu-
ous histories of England’s ports, its interfaces with the wider world. Ships
also refer us back to the middle passage, to the half remembered micro-​
politics of the slave trade and its relationship to both industrialization and
modernization . . . the ship is the first of the novel chronotopes presup-
posed by my attempts to rethink modernity via the history of the black
Atlantic and the African diaspora into the western hemisphere.33
Gilroy’s ship makes the Atlantic diachronic and synchronic at once; join-
ing multiple geographic, cultural, economic, and political spaces, the ship
also refers back to itself and to the sea. Ships are one of Foucault’s “hetero-
topias,” those countercultural images of “a kind of effectively enacted uto-
pia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within
the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted.”34 And
as Glissant, Dash, Latour, and Ian Baucom each stress, understanding the
Atlantic world above all else demands attention to the connections between
spaces.35 These connections help account for the significance of the sea in
New World romances, as staging ground for melodrama, passage of travel,
symbol in excess of nation, and metaphor for the dynamism and explora-
tion that comprises the hemispheric regionalism this book examines; it also
underscores how literature, like Gilroy’s ship, is a unit of analysis through
which Atlantic traffic and the interrelations of regions and hemispheres can
be read.
Hester Blum and Margaret Cohen have convincingly established an epis-
temology unique to the sea but one that has always been bound up with land-​
based economies. Cohen describes “sea adventures [that] depict action rather
than psychology,” as “episodic” in nature, and as literature attentive to the
“plausibility of performance rather than mimesis.” Sea fiction, she argues,
embraces the “practical skills of oceangoing adventurers” and “explores an
aspect of modern consciousness as constitutive as transcendental homeless-
ness and abstraction.”36 The practical reasoning of sea novels and “modern
consciousness” are integral, but cannot be fully appreciated until we take
“seriously adventure forms.”37 For Cohen, then, the romance and its central-
ity to the maritime corpus needs to be moved into the critical foreground,
not only to flesh out a more comprehensive literary history but also to more
accurately reflect the importance of the sea and literature to modernity and a
sense of modern consciousness.
Blum situates the sea as vital to American Studies, specifically, “the sea is
geographically central to the hemispheric or transnational turn in American
Studies and to Atlantic and Pacific Studies.”38 The hemispheric turn is
one among many post-​national formulations that attempt to account for
12Introduction

conditions out of which a concept of “nation” emerges. Caroline Levander

and Robert Levine in their collection Hemispheric American Studies stress
“nationality … [as] embedded within hemispheric cultural flows,” and that
“nations are intra-​as well as interdependent entities.” Such an understanding
opens out onto different archives, histories, and geographies, “out of which
the nation takes shape as an alternatively assumed, imagined, and enduringly
important category—​but ultimately just one category in a broader interpre-
tive field.”39 Yet critics have also cautioned against collapsing the southern
states into the Caribbean, making the Deep South its own nation, or replacing
the monolithic nation with a monolithic region.
My aim, however, is to do neither. By focusing on how romance mediates
conflicting regional relations I want to unsettle “region” as a fixed concept
with delimited borders and as an exclusively provincial, sub-​national, space.
This is not to deny the locality of places important to shifting concepts and
shifting geographies that I address in this study, but to suggest that critical
attention to the southern reaches highlights the movement, the relational-
ity, of concepts such as nation, region, and hemisphere, even as it also high-
lights specific locales, like Florida and Boston. By shifting our critical gaze
some “few hundred kilometers,” new stories emerge and old stories change.40
I argue that an Old World form like the romance wears conflicts and relations
between regions and histories on the surface, indeed, it revels in the instabil-
ity and irresolution these conflicts produce.
Hemispheric Regionalism, in its attempt to negotiate an expansive and pro-
visional map, also contributes to expanding the archive and period markers,
which have long confined literary studies. This study is invested in a field,
“historically longer, geographically larger, and morphologically deeper than
those few classics of nineteenth-​century Western European ‘realism’ that
have dominated the recent theory of the novel.”41 But Franco Moretti’s chal-
lenge to novel theory does not fully explain literary histories of the southern
Atlantic world: the novel neither accounts—​nor so completely substitutes—​
for romance as a genre. We know this as soon as we look beyond the concep-
tual and geographic borders of “nation” and we know this as soon as we take
seriously the generic contours of romance and archives of popular fiction.

The Romance and History of Charles Brockden Brown

I came to this project through my sense that the Haitian Revolution, and
later, the United States’ keen investments in Cuba, influenced literature
in important ways. The theoretical work of romance that Hemispheric
Regionalism argues for, however, was already present in writer and critic,
Charles Brockden Brown, who recognized and developed romance’s capac-
ity to transform, and invert, the problem of geography and history in the
Introduction 13

eighteenth century. In his clearest articulation of romance, “The Difference

between History and Romance,” published in the Monthly Magazine and
American Review in 1800, Brown claims that a romancer is the superior
observer, conjecturer, and overall scientist of human behavior.42 While the
split between history-​as-​t ruth and romance-​as-​fiction seems reasonable in
theory, he suggests, these suppositions fall apart when put into practice
because of readers’ natural tendency to conjecture, regardless of whether
the narratives are “fictitious” or “true.” Since true narratives often relate
events and conditions fairly unknown to the common reader, she becomes
“prone to arrange them anew, and to deviate from present and sensible
objects, into speculations on the past or future.”43 True histories inevita-
bly turn the common reader into a romancer. While the historian “care-
fully watches, and faithfully enumerates the appearances which occur”;
the romancer “adorns these appearances with cause and effect, and traces
resemblances between the past, distant, and future, with the present.”44 He
is a “dealer … in probabilities” rather than certainties.
Brown’s theories of fiction anticipate the ways later writers exploit the for-
mal and historical elasticity of romance to make sense of US‒hemispheric
relations.45 A speculative genre, it invites comparisons between geographic
regions and among different moments in time. Its contours allow for the rap-
idly changing conceptions of space and time of the period, especially appeal-
ing to writers laboring to compensate for the newness of the United States and
for a continental past compromised by violence against native populations.
Michael Davitt Bell claims that Brown “produced a body of work prophetic
of much of the later development of the theory and practice of the American
romance.”46 But Brown’s vast archive of essays, short fictional forms, and phil-
osophical romances reveals a theoretical infrastructure that later writers such
as Irving, Hawthorne, and Melville thoroughly depend upon.
Viewing romance as an adaptive form of conjectural history made it pos-
sible for Brown to connect narrative temporality with geographic space.
Throughout his writing, distance figures as central to narrative structure,
conforming to what Mark Salber Phillips identifies as both a formal and social
construction, “a place where the poetics and politics of narrative combine in
ways impossible to separate.”47 Brown creates a sense of distance through a
variety of narrative strategies. His romances are epistolary, his essays feature
fictionalized historical figures within contemporary sociopolitical contexts,
and both often conjecture back and forth in time. Characters such as Clara
Wieland, Arthur Mervyn, and Clithero are psychically estranged or geo-
graphically exiled. Edgar Huntly (1799) and Wieland (1798) feature somnam-
bulism and ventriloquism as essential plot elements and vehicles for exploring
the philosophical and political anxieties that plagued much of Brown’s writ-
ing. Finally, though, Brown’s gaze into a geographical distance from the per-
spective of his regional roots in Pennsylvania provides the clearest sense of
14Introduction

how the concept and figuration of distance is fundamental to the meaning of

his works.
In his earliest writing, The Rhapsodist (1782), place is the fixed variable, a
“firm and immortal basis” against which the romancer might contemplate
history and the “traces [which] are for ever [sic] visible … its vestiges pre-
served entire to the remotest period of futurity.”48 In Brown’s more political
essays, the relations between history and geography are inverted, even while
they depend upon the same distancing strategies evident in his earliest con-
templations on history, romance, and fiction. In other words, Brown’s later
work stabilizes a sense of history in a particular moment in order to range
beyond the borders of the region and, finally, the nation.
In Brown’s later writing he focuses quite explicitly on the geographic and
political influence of imperial contests within the US‒hemispheric context. In
An Address to the Government of the United States on the Cessation of Louisiana
to the French, and on the Late Breach of Treaty by the Spaniards, Including the
translation of a memorial, on the War of St. Domingo, and the Cessation of
Mississippi to France, drawn up by a counselor of State, published in 1803, the
coordinates of geography and history are dynamic as he negotiates the rela-
tionships between France, Saint-​Domingue, and Louisiana. An “ordinary cit-
izen” accidentally discovers a French plot to infiltrate and colonize Louisiana,
a discovery made in a letter written to Napoleon and which is included in the
pamphlet. Brown’s pamphlet emphasizes the horrors of slavery and colonial
mismanagement, and urgently pleads for readers to “awaken … from this
fatal sleep.” Brown’s fictional citizen underscores the danger of association
with Saint-​Domingue for institutional slavery and implicates French revolu-
tionary ideals in the slaves’ assertion of rights.
Brown’s subtle consideration of four interrelated geographical regions can be
productively compared to Moretti’s concept of distant reading, “where distance …
is a condition of knowledge.”49 Brown’s work mediates geography through the
“devices, themes, tropes” of genre.50 Mixed genres like the romance exhibit
“thematic excavations around distance, transmission, and absence [that]
extend outside traditional European boundaries to configure extranational
referents, incorporate recalcitrant bodies, and explore forms of cosmopolitan-
ism that address other civilizations.”51 Brown’s articulation of distance through
character, geography, and anachronism suggests a form of hemispheric region-
alism already bound to the features of romance-​as-​history at the end of the
eighteenth century.
Brown reconfigures scale on a geographic plane, shifting historical time and
narrative temporality into the background. Such a move carves out narrative
space for the regional, and local, to come into the foreground. In his increas-
ing attention to the nation’s international relations, especially in the nearest
US neighbors throughout the American hemisphere, Brown places contem-
porary cultural geography into a long, and variegated, historical sweep.
Introduction 15

In one final example of this turn to geography, Brown writes in “The

Annals of Europe and America,” published in the American Register in 1808:
Though it requires no extensive research to discover instances of selfish
and iniquitous policy in the history of all nations, and especially in British
history, mankind seldom extend their view beyond the present scene, and
the recent usurpations of the French in the free cities and small states of
Germany, in Switzerland, and Italy, excluded from the view of political
observers the more ancient or distant examples of similar iniquities in the
conduct of Great Britain. Even the recent conduct of that power in Turkey
was as egregious an instance of political injustice as the imagination can
conceive; but it was transacted at a distance . . . and affected a race of men
too much unlike ourselves to awaken our sympathy.52
The tropes and anxieties of Brown’s earliest writing are found throughout
the passage: a concern with the reader’s ability to see “beyond the present
scene”; the sense that the writer, who translates geographic relations, should
negotiate distance; and the desire to “awaken [the] sympathy” of readers for
people who remain “too unlike ourselves.” Shifting the pastness of time into
the background allows Brown to situate the presentness of geography in the
foreground. For Brown, then, history is implicit in the shift to geography,
just as the nation supplants the category of history as such in Hawthorne’s
romances. Brown not only makes possible a form of fiction which is self-​
consciously historical in the eighteenth century but also introduces the
grounds upon which history becomes the latent content of romance in the
nineteenth century.

Organization

The book is organized into three parts, five chapters, and a concluding coda.
Each part reads a particular form of romance alongside or within the par-
ticular geography and region of the Americas: the gothic romance and Haiti,
the popular romance and Cuba, and finally, the historical romance and its
representation of US literary nationalism. In the first part, “Specters of Haiti
and the Gothic Romance,” I argue that the slave uprisings in Saint-​Domingue
and subsequent establishment of the first black nation-​state of Haiti are
constitutive of the gothic romance. The black revolution and especially the
waves of immigration that follow in its wake pose an overwhelming threat to
institutional slavery across the New World. The Saint-​Dominguan popula-
tion undermined the white supremacist logic structuring the United States
beyond institutional slavery. Most powerfully, the Haitian Revolution and its
spectacular violence brought latent fears of blackness to the surface in the
minds of a white population. It became the symbol of an imaginary world
16Introduction

in which blacks overpowered whites and wreaked revenge against centuries

of racism, the Atlantic trade, and the violence of a plantation economy. In
­chapter 1, “Fugitive Slave Narratives and Atlantic Conspiracies,” I read the
trial transcripts and copious amounts of print surrounding the conspira-
cies of Gabriel Prosser, Denmark Vesey, and Nat Turner. The conspiracies
of Prosser, Vesey, and Turner, I argue, are overdetermined by the violence in
Haiti. References to and features of each archive, characterized by the fugitive
slave narrative of its leader, adopt the language of terror and horror, helping
to suture the link between slavery, blackness, and gothic romance across the
United States.
Chapter 2, “ ‘The Sea is History’: Apocalypse and the New World Romance,”
reads work by Blackwood’s Magazine contributor and travel writer John
Howison, Edgar Allan Poe, and Herman Melville as key gothic romances
that perform the cultural work of mitigating slave violence at the level of lit-
erary form. This chapter extends the importance of Haiti established in the
fugitive slave narratives in order to demonstrate the ways in which it struc-
tures the explicit fictionality of literature in the period. In each instance, John
Howison’s “The Florida Pirate” (1821), Edgar Allan Poe’s Narrative of Arthur
Gordon Pym (1837), and Herman Melville’s Benito Cereno (1855), the example
of the Haitian Revolution and black slave uprising underlies an apocalyptic
temporality and highlights the influence of the catastrophic Atlantic revolu-
tion upon US conceptions of the nation’s future.
In the second part of the book, “The ‘Boulevard of the New World’ and
the Work of Popular Romance,” I examine the proliferation of cheap fic-
tion across a burgeoning periodical culture in order to establish the role of
Cuba in the formation of popular romances. Chapter 3, “Popular Histories
and Serious Fictions: Manifest Destiny and the Spanish Atlantic World,”
situates Washington Irving’s biography of Christopher Columbus and A. O.
Exquemelin’s Buccaneers of America as exemplary texts in which history and
romance collide in popular forms. Irving and Exquemelin, too, make the
Spanish American world central subjects, contexts, and thematic preoccupa-
tions of their work, and provide a template for writers engaging their own
present conflicts while entertaining the greatest number of readers. The pop-
ular romances of the period illustrate how conceptions of manifest destiny
structure temporality while engaging expansionist discourses about what one
writer called the “Far South.”53 Popular romances, ultimately, play a key role
in establishing a “native” periodical culture and distinguishing it from what
Meredith McGill calls the “culture of reprinting” of English essays, fiction,
and poetry.54
Chapter 4, “Maturin M. Ballou, Periodical Romance, and the Editor
Function,” focuses on prominent editor and popular romance writer, Maturin
Murray Ballou, or “Lieutenant Murray,” in order to highlight the relation-
ship between Cuba and popular literature teasing out the themes, plots, and
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