Scholarly Publications - American Culture and Literature

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/11693/115636

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Open Access
“Sometimes a real one!”: mock marriage, performative utterances, and liberal politics in Antebellum City mysteries fiction
(Routledge, 2023) McDonald, Patrick
This chapter argues that marriage has been a privileged means through which scholars analyze the cultural workings of nineteenth-century liberalism. It is however generally taken for a constative fact rather than the performative utterance par excellence. Analyzing marriage’s decidedly performative dimension in two works of city mysteries fiction, H.M. Rulison’s The Mock Marriage and George Foster’s New York by Gas-Light, this chapter identifies a critique of liberalism and its institutions on the grounds that, like all performative utterances, marriages are always haunted by the possibility of misfiring. While antebellum legal theorists’ and contemporary critics’ favorite example of the liberal state is the marriage contract, both of these authors stage a questionably legitimate marriage to interrogate the possibility of equity. Foster and Rulison thereby expose the liberal paradigm of marriage as a referential illusion, demonstrate liberalism’s performative underpinnings, and imagine equitable political action grounded in a democratic political theology rather than groundless performative utterances.
Open Access
Liberalism, performativity, secularism: introduction
(Routledge, 2023) McDonald, Patrick
This introduction contends that performativity is central to the secular liberal state and that 1850s American literature registers this centrality. Engaging with the theories of liberalism from Michele Foucault and Claude Lefort and the speech act theory of J.L. Austin and Shoshana Felman, this chapter identifies performative utterance as the common denominator of liberal institutions and the source of their inherent instability that its twentieth-century critics identify. The antebellum liberal state and the institutions that comprise it depend upon self-authorizing performatives in order to function which the secular liberal state must misrecognize as constative. The period’s literature appropriates this insight in order to think the state and political authority on transcendent grounds drawn from the Christian theological tradition.
Open Access
Auction goers or lynch mobs?: authority and representation in the quadroon and the octoroon
(Routledge, 2023) McDonald, Patrick
This chapter explores the surprising conjunction in the 1850s’ imagination between the courtroom trial’s extralegal underside, the lynching, and state-sanctioned public auction sales. In much the same way that Southworth and Cooper diagnose the law’s performative underpinnings, Dion Boucicault’s drama The Octoroon and its novelistic predecessor Captain Mayne Reid’s The Quadroon use two famous quotidian practices of the slave economy and abolitionist tropes, the slave auction and the lynch mob, to explore the aesthetics of authority and the role of transcendence in liberal institutions from a transatlantic perspective. By examining minutely a slave auction and successive (attempted) lynchings, both Mayne Reid and Boucicault indict the groundlessness of authority in both institutions so central to Southern chattel slavery. While many critics read these texts as commentaries on race and its (de)construction, each text shows a more intense interest in the grounding and aesthetics of political and legal authority. For each author and in each case, legitimate authority is one that is capable of representing something outside of and beyond its performances—the quasi-divine majesty of law and commerce for Reid; Christian community norms for Boucicault. Both The Quadroon and The Octoroon ultimately insist that politics must account for the transcendent and that its rejection is what allows antebellum liberalism to countenance slavery.
Open Access
Republican simplicity on trial: courtrooms, aesthetics, and the law
(Routledge, 2023) McDonald, Patrick
This chapter explores the courtroom trial’s performative dimensions in two quite distinct novels from the 1850s, James Fenimore Cooper’s final novel The Ways of the Hour and E.D.E.N. Southworth’s The Hidden Hand, each of which makes trial scenes central to their narrative action. Moreover, each work emphasizes that something beyond the newly hegemonic legal formalism and a cold, calculating administration of justice is at stake in a trial. Each novel asserts that trials attempt to performativly establish a transcendent referent where there is none. For both authors, a trial’s outcome, given its inherent performativity, is capricious and arbitrary given this absence. Not stopping at this critique, Cooper asserts that the United States requires a new legal aesthetics that rejects an aesthetics of “republican simplicity” identified with mob rule in favor of one more closely identified with the Italian Risorgimento and the Biblical King David. Contrarily, Southworth’s novel suggests that sentiment and divinely-sanctioned—not merely performative—promises, rather than formalism, contracts, and duty, ought to undergird the United States legal system. Despite their divergence on the solution, each identifies a similar problem and tethers the law to Christian transcendence instead of secular legal formalism.
Open Access
Contracts without covenants?: political authority in Moby-Dick and the confidence-man
(Routledge, 2023) McDonald, Patrick
This chapter examines perhaps liberal theory’s favorite and ostensibly atheatrical political concept and legal instrument: the contract. Reading Herman Melville’s work, particularly Moby-Dick and The Confidence-Man with Early Modern articulations of contract in Thomas Hobbes and The Merchant of Venice, we find that Melville insists upon contract’s performativity through its necessary iterability and reliance on theatrical conventions at the moment of ratification and fulfillment. In Moby-Dick, Melville stages a conflict between two antimonious contracts to insist upon contract’s constitutive iterability and doubleness while also highlighting its necessary aesthetic and affective, that is to say dramatic, elements. The Confidence-Man takes this observation a step further. Near the text’s end, Melville holds out contract as a panacea to authority’s absence aboard the riverboat Fidele. However contract turns ironically against itself because of its theatrical dimensions. The aesthetic and performative dimensions of contract require a transcendent, supplemental authority to have any force, one found in Moby-Dick but not in The Confidence-Man. Melville thus asserts the contract’s ultimate groundlessness under liberalism and suggests, once again, that a political theology that appropriates the force of covenant must supplement liberalism’s political economy.
Open Access
Political theology in crisis: Orestes Brownson between Hobbes and Schmitt
(Routledge, 2023) McDonald, Patrick
This chapter situates antebellum literature within a larger political theological tradition by reading of Orestes Brownson’s political and theological writings. In response to three distinct crises in three different settings—seventeenth-century England, nineteenth-century America, and twentieth-century Germany—a diverse array of political theorists share a remarkably similar response. Crises of the market, political authority, the law, and representation are in the hands of Thomas Hobbes, Baruch Spinoza, Orestes Brownson, and Carl Schmitt opportunities to posit a new foundation for the political. Across these accounts, we find a common denominator of representation: under liberalism’s prevailing semiotic ideology nothing has a definite meaning anymore. Though the particularities of each response are different, each thinker posits a theological and representational supplement to the state that each contends will rectify the critical conjuncture in which they write. Hobbes’ and Spinoza’s miracle, Brownson’s incarnation, and Schmitt’s representation offer each thinker a way to transcend possessive individualism, link divine and civil authority, and incorporate definite meaning into political life. Accordingly, each of this chapter’s sections outlines a contemporary crisis and political theory’s response to it, a corpus which includes 1850s American literature.
Open Access
An American, a Scot, and an Irishman at a Turkish coffeehouse: tales recounted in Ottoman coffeehouses introduced to the Western world
(Archaeopress, 2024-11-28) Tokay, Melike; Aščerić-Todd, Ines; Smajić, Aid; Starkey, Janet; Starkey, Paul
Cyrus Adler, an American 'authority on the Semitic languages', and Allan Ramsay, a Scot, 'one of the directors of the great Tobacco Régie of Turkey', visited various coffeehouses in the years 1890 and 1891 and collected the tales they listened to during these visits in a book entitled Told in the Coffee House: Turkish Tales, published in 1898 in New York and London. In its Preface, Adler stated that, 'in the course of a number of visits to Constantinople, I became much interested in the tales that are told in the coffee houses' (Adler and Ramsay 1898: v), for they were an indispensable part of that culture and were worth preserving as they might well reflect the customs, traditions, and ways of thinking of coffeehouse customers. Sixteen years after the publication of Adler and Ramsay's book in 1898, another collection of Turkish tales was introduced to Western readers. Francis McCullagh, an Irish journalist and war correspondent, collected a more substantial volume of folktales that included those from Adler and Ramsay's earlier book of 1898. McCullagh worked on this book with Allan Ramsay, a trusted expert both on Turkish tales and coffeehouses. This new collection, entitled Tales from Turkey, was published in 1914 in London. These Turkish tales and the humour these tales preserved brought these three independent travellers together. While the reasons for their visits to Constantinople (Istanbul) had differed, their appreciation of Turkish humour and their passion for preserving Ottoman folklore were similar. Their lives intersected in these unusual cooperative ventures, uniting their names on two published books of Turkish tales. In this chapter, I review the attractive and personal stories of these travellers while also shedding light on the common element in their diverse lives that had attracted them all to Constantinople: their admiration for the Turkish tales told in its coffeehouses. © The Authors and Archaeopress 2024.
Open Access
Women's work in the dystopian west: "The Colonies" in Hulu's The Handmaid's Tale
(Cambridge University Press, 2024-12-16) Mccormack, Kara Lee
This paper examines the ways the Colonies in the American streaming service Hulu's The Handmaid's Taleutilize western myth to reimagine the American West as an entirely female space. Relying on popular understandings of the significance of the mythic West, traditional conceptions of the West as masculine, and the narrative function of the western, it argues that the Colonies offer regeneration and renewal for the women whose agency has been stripped in the hypergendered oppressive nation of Gilead. By reinstilling a sense of power and freedom in the women sent there, the Colonies operate much like the West of the imagination, allowing these women to escape the confines of Gilead and the chance to both return to their authentic selves and foresee a better world.
Open Access
C. Dallet Hemphill, Philadelphia stories: people and their places in early America
(Oxford Univ Press Inc, 2023-08-16) Johnson, Daniel Peter
Open Access
Liberalism, Theology, and the Performative in Antebellum American Literature
(Routledge, 2023-09-19) Mcdonald, Patrick
The 1850s United States witnessed a far-reaching political, social, and economic crisis. Symptomatic of this, a wide range of narrative fiction from sentimental novels to sensational drama identifies a foundational link between liberal institutions and performative utterances. Auctions, trials, marriages, and contracts, this fiction contends, all depend on the self-constituting authority of words and performances which anybody and everybody can appropriate and are always subject to misfiring. Rather than viewing this as a liberatory and egalitarian political force, however, writers from Herman Melville and James Fenimore Cooper to Captain Mayne Reid and E.D.E.N. Southworth insist that such naked authority must be supplemented. A broad swath of 1850s literature insists that this supplement ought to come from Christianity. Anticipating thinkers like Carl Schmitt and Giorgio Agamben, these works suggest that legitimate political authority depends upon its ability to represent Christian transcendence and account for revealed truth, something firmly outside of speech acts’ and performance’s purview. In so doing, this diverse body of fiction registers a desire to reconstitute political authority on transcendent and representable ground, augmenting institutional reliance on mere words and assuaging the contemporary crises of confidence and authority.
Open Access
Crime in the city of brotherly love
(History Today Ltd., 2022-01) Johnson, Daniel
Open Access
American Gothic; or, what Melville can teach us
(New Politics Associates, Inc., 2021-07-19) Johnson, Daniel
Open Access
‘Profane language, horrid oaths and imprecations’: order and the colonial soundscape in the American mid-Atlantic, 1650–1750
(Routledge, 2021-08-04) Johnson, Daniel
One of the most important developments in the historical discipline in recent years has been the growth of histories of the senses, and studies of sound and soundscapes have made important contributions to this growing field. The relationship between a perennial early modern concern for social order and ‘noise’ has received relatively little attention, however. This article examines the formation of novel soundscapes between the 1650s and 1740s in the North American middle colonies, the most ethnically and culturally diverse region of the English Atlantic world. Placing special emphasis on the region’s two largest cities, New York and Philadelphia, it argues that the mid-Atlantic’s distinctive soundscapes posed significant problems of order for urban and provincial authorities during a period of elite Anglicization. Sound was more than a way to encourage new norms of politeness; it was a source of contestation between different cultural systems. Speech, music and other sounds were also instrumental in processes of class, ethnic and racial formation.
Open Access
"Nothing will satisfy you but money" Debt, freedom, and the mid-atlantic culture of money, 1670–1764
(University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021-02-03) Johnson, Daniel
Politics in British America often centered on the issue of currency. Competing ideas about the nature of money and what constituted just relations of credit and debt also pervaded everyday colonial culture. By the late seventeenth century, some mid-Atlantic colonists believed that colonial debt laws and powerful urban merchants’ monopolization of coin led to the appropriation of debtors’ land and labor. Assembly emissions of bills of credit in New York and Pennsylvania in the 1710s and 1720s eased many debtors’ burdens, but the creation of provincial paper monies enhanced rather than diminished money’s importance as an object of social and political controversy in the region. By the middle of the eighteenth century, supporters of paper money believed that bills of credit uniquely embodied liberty, possessing the power to maintain ordinary inhabitants’ independence. Monetary scarcity, by contrast, portended dispossession and bondage. This article analyzes the petitions, pamphlets, editorials, broadsides, and crowd actions that contributed to the creation of a distinctive culture of money in the mid-Atlantic between the 1670s and 1760s.
Open Access
The next America: boomers, millennials, and the looming generational showdown (Paul Taylor and Pew Research Center, Public Affairs, New York, 2014, 288 Pages)
(Uluslararası Stratejik Araştırmalar Kurumu, 2014) Bahar, Hacer
Paul Taylor, the author of The Next America: Boomers, Millennials, and the Looming Generational Showdown, analyzes the changes that have been occur-ring in the demographic social, political and cultural structures of the present American society, and tries to predict how those changes will form the U.S.’ future and affect the generations. The book illustrates the generations’ perspectives on religion, technology, race, immigration, gender roles, marriage, and employment. The arguments in the book are based on the public surveys and data that Taylor received from Pew Research Center, an independent think that provides knowledge and data in social, political and cultural spectrums. Taylor is the executive vice president of the Pew Research Center.
Open Access
Youth in crisis: an Eriksonian interpretation of adolescent identity in "Franny"
(Children's Research Center, 2008) Bezci, Şenol
The purpose of this paper is to discuss Jerome David Salinger’s short story "Franny" from an Eriksonian point of view. Erik Erikson, still a major figure in the study of personality development, pays substantial importance to adolescence since it is the main period of identity formation, which some adolescent find difficult to go through. Adolescents that cannot develop fidelity to their society end up having either fanaticism or repudiation as it has been illustrated thorough Salinger’s main characters in “Franny”. Contrary to the general perception of Salinger critics, Franny is not an adolescent to look up to when approached with Erikson’s theories on adolescence and identity formation.
Open Access
Obama's 'whitess' and the politics of recognition: hybridizing white spaces and problematizing blackness
(Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012) Demirtürk, Emine Lale; Rahming, M. B.
Open Access
Foucault, Michel
(Springer, 2012) Bryson, Dennis R.; Rieber, R. W.
Open Access
Cult of Domesticity
(SAGE Publications, Inc., 2004) Winter, Thomas; Carroll, Bret E.
The “cult of domesticity” was first explored as a historical phenomenon in antebellum U.S. society by Barbara Welter, who wrote in 1966 of a “cult of true womanhood,” though the phrase itself was coined by the historian Aileen Kraditor in 1968. Part of a broader nineteenth-century northern middle-class ideology of “separate spheres,” the cult of domesticity identified womanhood with the private or domestic sphere of the home and manhood with the public sphere of economic competition and politics. While the cult of domesticity primarily concerned a definition of femininity, defining the home as a space governed by women's sentimental, moral and spiritual influence, this ideology also contributed to definitions of manliness and sought to control male passions at a time when the market revolution, urbanization, ...
Open Access
Democratic Manhood
(SAGE Publications, Inc., 2004) Winter, Thomas; Carroll, Bret E.
Between 1815 and the 1840s, a concept of democratic manhood emerged in the United States, marking a conscious rejection of European (especially British) notions of ascribed social status. Strongly associated with Democratic president Andrew Jackson, democratic manhood was defined as political equality and broadened political participation among white men—and by the exclusion of women and nonwhites from the privileges of citizenship. It emphasized physical prowess and boisterous patriotism, expressed by the popularity of such frontiersmen as Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett. Furthermore, the concept informed a developing urban counterculture that resisted the aristocratic pretensions and bourgeois morality of an emerging middle class.