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Deliberation, in recent years, has emerged as a form of civic engagement worth reclaiming. This book combines historical literary analysis and political theory in order to demonstrate that current democratic practices of deliberation are rooted in the civic rhetoric that flourished in the early American republic. Though the U.S. Constitution made deliberation central to republican self-governance, the ethical emphasis on group deliberation often conflicted with the rhetorical focus on persuasive speech. From Alexis de Tocqueville's ideas about the deliberative basis of American democracy through the works of Walt Whitman, John Dewey, John F. Kennedy, and Martin Luther King Jr., this book shows how writers and speakers have made the aesthetic and political possibilities of deliberation central to their autobiographies, manifestos, novels, and orations. Examining seven key writers from the early American republic—including James Fenimore Cooper, David Crockett, and Daniel Webster—whose works of deliberative imagination explored the intersections of style and democratic substance, the book offers a mode of historical and textual analysis that displays the wide range of resources imaginative language can contribute to political life.

This book treats the business corporation as an imaginative construct, a fiction that informs other fictions and exerts agency in the world. The book uses literary texts--novels, plays, poetry--as well as economic texts by writers as varied as Karl Marx, Adam Smith, John Maynard Keynes, and Ronald Coase, to explore what it calls the cultural unconscious of the business corporation during its rise to autonomy in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. Emerging out of the “incorporated” institutions of the Middle Ages, the towns, guilds, universities, and charities that were given royal patents or licenses to enable groups of people to carry out particular activities, the business corporation of the modern period has become the pre-eminent agent of the modern economic system. As such, corporations have often been seen to threaten the autonomy of individual persons. Literature Incorporated argues that the modern person and the modern individual are concepts that have long been deeply interwoven, and have from the early modern period been inextricable from each other.

This book offers an account of how, in the midst of a chronic political crisis, American Whigs seized the political initiative through a set of interrelated innovations in communication. To understand the power of these innovations, this book zooms into moments of political crisis in British America where events could have gone either way: the day after the Boston Massacre; the late December days that culminated in the destruction of the tea in Boston harbour; and the days of late May 1774 when the Virginia committee of correspondence responded to Parliament’s punitive bill closing Boston harbour. In the last of these crises, American Whigs gained leverage from their earlier invention of the standing committee of correspondence and the popular declaration, and their deployment of both to develop an intercolonial network of American Whigs. This Whig network could only emerge because of the character of two media institutions that had developed over the previous century: the postal system and the weekly newspaper. By being open, public, and free (of government control), the newspapers and the postal system served as robust supports for political communication. At the heart of revolutionary communication were certain generally observed protocols—of legal procedure, corporate action, public access, general address, and virtuous initiative—which this book traces through the full arc of the political crisis: from the Boston town meeting’s appointment of a Boston committee of correspondence to compose a pamphlet stating their rights and grievances to the Continental Congress’ drafting and publication of the Declaration of 1776.