American Fragments: The Political Aesthetic of Unfinished Forms in the Early Republic by Daniel Diez Couch

Abstract

Reviewed by: American Fragments: The Political Aesthetic of Unfinished Forms in the Early Republic by Daniel Diez Couch Kacy Dowd Tillman (bio) American literature, Writing, Early American literature American Fragments: The Political Aesthetic of Unfinished Forms in the Early Republic. By Daniel Diez Couch. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022. Pp. 281. Cloth, $69.95.) Daniel Diez Couch's book American Fragments: The Political Aesthetic of Unfinished Forms in the Early Republic explores why people were interested in reading and writing fragments between 1787 and 1813. The argument is that fragments "pushed readers to move beyond their texts and imagine new ways of being for those with disabilities, seduced and ruined women, prostitutes, and the poor, among others" (164). The book's goal is to "recove[r] the history of a neglected aesthetic form that articulated distinct sociopolitical ramifications in the United States" because, Couch says, they "played a major role in reshaping the artistic and political landscape after the Revolution" (4). The book is excellent. If American Fragments could be said to have any shortcomings, it is that Couch almost undersells how important this work is for introducing possibilities for studying other genres of literature that fall outside of the novel, poem, or play. [End Page 190] This book is not about random incoherent bits of ephemera, as the titular word "fragment" might suggest. Instead, the chapters primarily chart the ways people were "perpetually in progress," the fragment itself representative of their potential (164). While it does concern incomplete literary works, it also explores the seduced body, the enslaved body, the wounded soldier, and even authors' posthumous "leftovers" as fragments. People interested in material culture and the history of the book will appreciate Couch's perspective, as the text discusses not only the political potential of fragments but also the textual and material ways that they are represented on the page, via asterisks, shifts in language, spaces, and changes in type. Because fragments both span and defy genre, the book covers everything from pro-American and loyalist war pamphlets to political cartoons and essays; to novels; to sermons, poems, and tracts that conscript Biblical passages to suit their designs; and, finally, to "sick fragments" representing the experience of illness in the nineteenth century (183). One of the books' many strengths is that it places political writers, essayists, and cartoonists in conversation with poets and novelists who all embraced the fragment in one way or another in their works. Couch includes Washington Irving, Charles Brockden Brown, Susanna Rowson, Hannah Webster Foster, Sarah Wentworth Morton, Mathew Carey, Benjamin Franklin, Lydia Maria Child, Lydia Huntley Sigourney, Thomas Paine, Samuel Jackson Pratt, and George Washington, to name a few. Although a lot of the authors in this study are white writers, Couch is interested in how fragments offer different perspectives on race and gender in the late eighteenth century. This is particularly true in his chapters "Biblical Economy" and "Ruinous Designs and the Novel of Seduction." The former explores how three essay fragments—"The Prostitute," "The Slave," and "Negro trade"—"advocate for an increasing awareness of social ills within the growing nation" (144). The texts are metonymic of the fragmented body of enslaved people, who were not recognized as citizens with political agency of their own in the new republic. The latter chapter explains how the language that writers used to describe a ruined woman share etymology with architectural ruins. Couch argues that "seduction novels . . . sought to valorize ruins" in order to "offe[r] a means of reconceptualizing the subjectivity of fallen women" (99). If any argument in this book seemed slightly undercooked, it was this one, primarily because this chapter suggests that ruined female bodies—which, in seduction novels are often raped, sick, and even dead—are akin to "material ruins" in that they are "sources of sublime inspiration" (109). I struggle with the [End Page 191] notion of a raped woman's body as sublime inspiration for anything reparative. But I agree that Charlotte Temple, The Coquette, and other sentimental novels from this period are attempting to reclaim the seduced woman from being "ruined" to having "something that remains and persists despite its partial deterioration," which is an astute gendered reading...