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This book charts the phenomenon of the love of Britain that emerged after the Revolution and remains in the character of U.S. society and class, the style of academic life, and the idea of American intellectualism. But as the author shows, this Anglophilia was more than just an elite nostalgia; it was popular devotion that made reverence for British tradition instrumental to the psychological innovations of democracy. Anglophilia spoke to fantasies of cultural belonging, polite sociability, and, finally, deference itself as an affective practice within egalitarian politics. The author traces the wide-ranging effects of Anglophilia on American literature, art, and intellectual life in the early nineteenth century, as well as its influence in arguments against slavery, in the politics of Union, and in the dialectics of liberty and loyalty before the Civil War. By working beyond narratives of British influence, the author highlights a more intricate culture of American response, one that included Whig elites, college students, radical democrats, urban immigrants, and African Americans. Ultimately, the book argues that the love of Britain was not simply a fetish or form of shame—a release from the burdens of American culture—but an anachronistic structure of attachment in which U.S. identity was lived in other languages of national expression.

The photographer and reformer Jacob Riis once wrote, “I have seen an armful of daisies keep the peace of a block better than a policeman and his club.” Riis was not alone in his belief that beauty could tame urban chaos, but are aesthetic experiences always a social good? Could aesthetics also inspire violent crime, working-class unrest, and racial murder? To answer these questions, this book turns to those who debated claims that art could democratize culture—civic reformers, anarchists, novelists, civil rights activists, and college professors—to reveal that beauty provides unexpected occasions for radical, even revolutionary, political thinking. It explores the intersection of beauty and violence by examining university lectures and course materials on aesthetics from a century ago along with riots, acts of domestic terrorism, magic lantern exhibitions, and other public spectacles. Philosophical aesthetics, realist novels, urban photography, and black periodicals, the book argues, inspired and instigated all sorts of collective social endeavors, from the progressive nature of tenement reform to the horrors of lynching. Discussing Jane Addams, W. E. B. Du Bois, Charlie Chaplin, William Dean Howells, and Riis as aesthetic theorists in the company of Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Schiller, the book ultimately suggests that the distance separating academic thinking and popular wisdom about social transformation is narrower than is generally assumed.

This book offers a history of mesmerism, or animal magnetism, in the antebellum (pre-Civil War) United States. Imported from the plantations of the French Antilles by founder Charles Poyen, established in New England textile-factory cities, and practiced throughout the US, mesmerism was surprisingly central to American life and to such canonical figures as Benjamin Franklin, Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. It embraced a variety of phenomena, including somnambulism, mind control, spirit travel, and clairvoyance. Widely practiced from the 1830s to 1860, when it gave way to successor practices spiritualism and hypnosis, this occult science was understood by its practitioners as a way to make rational use of other people’s credulity, or tendency toward belief. The same predispositions that false priests had exploited to inveigle their devotees would now be made to serve modern ends, such as labor discipline, communication, and self-culture. Mesmerism thus poses a challenge to our ordinary view of secularization. Mesmerists neither rejected enchantment nor succumbed to it; instead, they managed it and exploited it in others. The history of mesmerism offers a fresh perspective on scholarly concerns related to modernity and the secular, such as colonialism, agency, the ideal of “empowerment,” and the place of belief. It shows us that modern enchantment is not a radical alternative or an atavistic throwback, but a target and a technique of management.

This study of literature and law before and since the Civil War shows how American conceptions of slavery, property, and the idea of the fugitive were profoundly interconnected. It uncovers a poetics of intangible, personified property emerging out of antebellum laws, circulating through key nineteenth-century works of literature, and informing cultural forms such as blackface minstrelsy and early race films. The book argues that legal principles dealing with fugitives and indebted persons provided a sophisticated precursor to intellectual property law as it dealt with rights in appearance, expression, and other abstract aspects of personhood. In this conception of property as fleeting, indeed fugitive, American law preserved for much of the rest of the century slavery's most pressing legal imperative: the production of personhood as a market commodity. By revealing the paradoxes of this relationship between fugitive slave law and intellectual property law, the book helps us to understand how race achieved much of its force in the American cultural imagination.

The modern idea of Victorians is that they were emotionless prudes, imprisoned by sexual repression and suffocating social constraints; they expressed love and affection only within the bounds of matrimony—if at all. And yet, a wealth of evidence contradicting this idea has been hiding in plain sight for close to a century. This book turns to the novels and short stories of Victorian America to uncover the widely overlooked phenomenon of passionate friendships between men. Its examination of the literature of the period brings to light a forgotten genre: the fiction of romantic friendship. Delving into works by Mark Twain, Henry James, William Dean Howells, and others, the book identifies the genre's unique features and explores the connections between romantic friendships in literature and in real life. Situating love between men at the heart of Victorian culture, it alters our understanding of the American literary canon, and, with its deep insights into the emotional and intellectual life of the period, also offers a fresh perspective on nineteenth-century America's attitudes toward love, friendship, marriage, and sex.

A genteel southern intellectual, saloniste, and wife to a prominent colonel in Jefferson Davis's inner circle, Mary Chesnut today is remembered best for her penetrating Civil War diary. Composed between 1861 and 1865 and revised thoroughly from the late 1870s until Chesnut's death in 1886, the diary was published first in 1905, again in 1949, and later, to great acclaim, in 1981. This complicated literary history and the questions that attend it—which edition represents the real Chesnut? To what genre does this text belong?—may explain why the document largely has, until now, been overlooked in literary studies. This book's critical analysis returns Chesnut to her rightful place among American writers. The book argues that the revised diary offers the most trenchant literary account of race and slavery until the work of Faulkner and that, along with his Yoknapatawpha novels, it constitutes one of the two great Civil War epics of the American canon. By restoring Chesnut's 1880s revision to its complex, multidecade cultural context, the book argues both for Chesnut's reinsertion into the pantheon of nineteenth-century American letters and for her centrality to the literary history of women's writing as it evolved from sentimental to tragic to realist forms.

How did slavery and race impact American literature in the nineteenth century? This book argues that they were the carriers of linguistic restriction, and writers from Frederick Douglass to Stephen Crane wrestled with the demands for silence and circumspection that accompanied the antebellum fear of disunion and the postwar reconciliation between the North and South. Proposing a new interpretation of nineteenth-century American literature, this book examines struggles over permissible and impermissible utterance in works ranging from Thoreau's “Civil Disobedience” to Henry James's The Bostonians. Combining historical knowledge with readings of some of the classic texts of the American past, this book places Lincoln's Cooper Union address in the same constellation as Margaret Fuller's feminism and Thomas Dixon's defense of lynching. Arguing that slavery and race exerted coercive pressure on freedom of expression, the book offers here a transformative study that alters our understanding of nineteenth-century literary culture and its fraught engagement with the right to speak.