Climate Disorientation and Poe’s Uncanny Atmospheres

US literary critics and historians often tell a version of the same story about sovereignty in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world. It proceeds as follows: Classical republican ideas were circulated and then debated alongside vigorous discussions of John Locke’s model of liberal individualism. Imperfectly synthesized, so the tale goes, republicanism and liberalism came to define nineteenth-century US politics, culture, and letters. Although this narrative was initially extolled by scholars such as Gordon Wood and Warner Berthoff, subsequent generations left it intact but critiqued. Joyce Appleby highlighted liberalism’s shortcomings, Gillian Brown located individualism and republicanism in the home, and Saidiya Hartman examined this political tradition’s role in inflicting violent spectacles on enslaved people. Cathy Davidson gave us one of the most enduring and generative histories of print and literature built around these political traditions. From the 1980s forward, in fact, most New Americanist and historicist literary scholarship wrestled with the possibilities and problems of these transatlantic intellectual discourses even as this work forged new paths of inquiry into sentimentalism, colonialism, indigeneity, the black Atlantic, aesthetics, and biopolitics.Could it be time to turn our critical attention elsewhere, declaring the cultural study of sovereignty in nineteenth-century American literature generally settled? Paul Downes’s and Stacey Margolis’s latest monographs demonstrate otherwise. Though topically and theoretically distinct, Hobbes, Sovereignty, and Early American Literature and Fictions of Mass Democracy in Nineteenth-Century America demand that we revise sovereignty’s story in US culture. They do not so much call on us to forget what we have learned as they compel us to reckon with what we have learned to forget. Downes gives us a Thomas Hobbes whom Carl Schmitt would hardly recognize; this Hobbes offers no refuge to tyrants and neocons but rather rattles liberalism and capitalism epistemologically to their cores to recover resistance’s supplementary force. Margolis reframes mass democracy as having less to do with sovereignty than with public opinion. While the former left women, people of color, and the poor politically estranged, public opinion emerged as “the one facet of the democratic public sphere that seemed truly open” in the fiction examined by Margolis (21). Both published shortly before the 2016 presidential election, Downes’s and Margolis’s powerful studies are as timely as they are indispensable for any serious nineteenth-century Americanist, literary historian, or political theorist.Downes argues that Hobbes powerfully deconstructs liberal social contract philosophy. Hobbes accomplishes this feat by imagining a democratizing supplement or “a social sovereignty that belongs to the community but which does not contract with the community” (17). Whereas others could read the leviathan only as arbitrary power’s literal embodiment, Downes recovers its figurative signification as an artificial persona representing “the resistance offered by performative representational institutionality to any personification, ontologization, or idealization of externality, whether it be a liberal version of ‘the people’ or of God’s lieutenant, or of wisdom, morality, or ethnic purity” (61).Foregrounding Hobbes’s antitheological grasp of sovereignty, Downes reminds us that his state of nature is one devoid of inalienable rights granted by an extralegal deity. This means that all people are created equal because they share a common vulnerability: a propensity to abandon the social and slip back into a natural state of war against one another in an attempt to impose inequality temporarily. In place of a monarchist Hobbes, Downes gives us a seventeenth-century master Derridean. A self-preservation and self-destruction binary underwrites and threatens liberalism’s legitimacy, and we are left with the democratic supplement’s menacing force. Liberalism and capitalism produce profound inequalities, but the natural law that all people remain equal because everyone can perish in war means the insurgent can summon Hobbes’s leveling ghost to supplant one social order with one less destructive and unequal.To outline this deconstructionist Hobbes, Downes devotes several chapters to rereading Leviathan (1651) painstakingly alongside other historically situated philosophical tracts. These sections recall the meticulous cultural readings of the US Constitution and the law provided in work by Colin Dayan, Deak Nabers, Eric Slauter, and Ivy Wilson. These chapters prove necessary and engaging, but they postpone the turn to literary materials, which range from Edward Taylor to Nathaniel Hawthorne. Downes concludes by brilliantly revisiting Nat Turner’s legacy. Rather than revolting against a “slaveholding ideology” predicated on Hobbesian absolutism, Turner harnessed the terror associated with “a Hobbesian state of nature” to revolt against a slave state sustained by liberal capitalism and a suppression of the deconstructive reading of Hobbes (223).Further expanding recent studies of liberalism’s limits by Elizabeth Maddock Dillon and Siân Silyn Roberts, Margolis addresses how “rational ‘individual actions’ can produce ‘cumulative madness’” (10). The financial panic stands out as an illustrative example for her, as economic collapses often stem from sound individual assessments of risk. When single decisions become replicated by networks, however, financial disaster can strike. For this reason, she insists we should not hold the so-called wisdom of crowds in high regard. Gossip, information, and contagion flow through networks, and most importantly for Margolis, public opinion can sustain or undermine the state because of its networked form and content. These assertions become the basis for her compelling argument: “postrevolutionary fiction began to explore the mechanisms that produced public opinion by developing a series of thought experiments on the new democratic reality” (20).Fictions of Mass Democracy appeared the same year as Caroline Levine’s Forms (2015), and both broaden our understanding of network theory’s relevance to formal analysis. Margolis’s book has more to offer for those who study the nineteenth-century United States. She is no less theoretically sophisticated than Levine or Downes and compellingly redirects Chantal Mouffe’s, Claude Lefort’s, and even Jürgen Habermas’s thought in fresh ways, but her argument arises from a series of intensely illuminating and energetic readings of fiction. These qualities make her book hard to put down.Margolis surveys work by Charles Brockden Brown, Hawthorne, James Fenimore Cooper, Harriet Jacobs, and Fanny Fern. Her reading of Edgar Allan Poe stands out especially, belonging alongside the field’s best, such as those by Jonathan Elmer and Meredith McGill. Focusing on “The Man That Was Used Up” especially, Margolis establishes how gossip networks operate against rather than in concert with print publicity. Orchestrated media campaigns often do not stand a chance against rumor’s democratic power. Noting that being “‘used up’ meant to be perpetually in the public eye” in the nineteenth century, she argues that “the fact of the gossip” about the General, not the content, generates his mystery and celebrity (55). The many opinions about him, much like his discretely dismembered body, create unity out of multiplicity. Margolis forebodingly acknowledges that opinion echo chambers can dangerously polarize citizens, but, she asserts convincingly, Poe reminds us that these same networks produce public opinion in the first place. Public opinion in the nineteenth-century United States was about as direct as democracy could get.Historically rigorous, formally astute, and theoretically provocative, these latest books by Downes and Margolis assuredly will shape discussions surrounding democracy’s place in nineteenth-century US literature and culture in the years to come.

Reviewed by: Hispanicism and Early US Literature: Spain, Mexico, Cuba, and the Origins of US National Identity by John C Havard Maria A. Windell HAVARD, JOHN C. Hispanicism and Early US Literature: Spain, Mexico, Cuba, and the Origins of US National Identity. Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2018. 224 pp. $44.95 cloth; $44.95 e-book. The president of the United States is an avowed nationalist who constructs his position as such most consistently through xenophobic screeds against (im)migrants from Latin America. In such a political moment it is vital that we both produce and attend to scholarship that explores the US’s relationship to the Americas. John C. Havard’s Hispanicism and Early US Literature: Spain, Mexico, Cuba, and the Origins of US National Identity undertakes this task by tracking how the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century US defined itself through and against depictions of Spain’s imperial presence in the Americas. Havard posits the Hispanicism of his title as a counterpart to Edward W. Said’s and Toni Morrison’s more familiar formulations of Orientalism and Africanism. His use of Hispanicism builds on Ed White’s earlier coining of the term as a hemispheric parallel to the exoticism of Orientalism, and his argument more generally builds on developments in transamerican studies that highlight the necessity of nuancing nationalist and transatlantic framings of US literary traditions. In particular, he emphasizes Hispanicism’s “political dimension,” arguing that it “had a special role” in developing “the idea that Anglo-Americans were racially fitted for liberal-democratic self-government,” an idea that he insists goes beyond Africanism’s “constructi[on of] whiteness as a prerequisite for freedom and agency” (15). He thus asserts, “It is no coincidence that US representations of Hispanic difference focus on what is construed as the metaphysical aversion to liberty of the Spanish and their New World descendants in a period in which US expansionists turned their eyes toward Spanish Louisiana, Mexico, the Caribbean, and Central America” (18). Hispanicism and Early US Literature covers the aftermath of the American Revolution through the late nineteenth century, working to explain how the nation arrived at 1898 and the Spanish-American War, so often seen as a turning point in the development of US imperialism, with a discourse fully prepared to promote US intervention in Spanish America. In tracing Hispanicism across the long nineteenth century, Havard engages an array of canonical and noncanonical authors and texts—at times crossing these categories by, for instance, working with lesser-known novels by authors such as James Fenimore Cooper. The study includes poetry, novels, novellas, and essays, thereby demonstrating Hispanicism’s breadth, depth, and duration. Havard’s argument balances its formal, temporal, and geographic range with a focus on literature’s relation to US political discourses, particularly liberalism. Each chapter of Hispanicism and Early US Literature close reads its central text(s) while questioning how Hispanicism related to developments within liberalism. Havard notes that Hispanicism and liberalism were not, as we might presume today, opposed in the nineteenth century: “For many early national and antebellum whites, it seemed obvious that the capacity to establish liberal institutions was a specifically Anglo-American faculty. Liberalism and racialism were not at odds for these US Americans” (17). By locating Hispanicism within liberal political discourse, Havard illustrates not only the literary but also the cultural, social, commercial, and governmental impact of US tendencies to paint the Spanish (Americas) with a broad brush. The book is organized into an introduction, conclusion, and five chapters divided in two parts. The introduction offers an historical and critical framework [End Page 320] for Hispanicism. Part I of the book examines “The Black Legend, Hispanicism, and the Emergence of National Identity in the Early United States.” The three chapters that compose this section cover ways US authors positioned the nation in relation to ideas, perceptions, and images of Spain, Mexico, and Spanish(-American)ness from the 1780s through the years preceding the US Civil War. The first chapter reads Joel Barlow’s epic poems The Vision of Columbus (1787) and The Columbiad (1807) as establishing an Hispanicist ideology by juxtaposing a rising, cosmopolitan, commercial US against a greed-driven...

In a recent critique of early US cost accounting practice, Hoskin and Macve (1996) conclude that Lawrence Manufacturing Company's 1848 cost accounting reports were purely mercantile and provided no managerial utility. Despite finding mathematically exact allocations and unit costs for different cloth grades and production locations, Hoskin and Macve argue that mill accounting was neither modern nor managerial, descriptors they limit to the exercise of disciplinary control over labour through standard costs and variances. They conclude that scholars have overstated the managerial utility of cost accounting during the first half of the nineteenth century. In rebuttal, this paper garners archival evidence to show that cost accounting was used by early nineteenth-century US textile owner/managers in a variety of decision-making, management control and problem-solving scenarios. Specific attention was directed to evidence in forms other than accounting ledgers and summary statements, i.e. letters, memoranda, cost reports, etc., which might reveal if and how accounting was used to address issues such as make-or-buy, product pricing, wage setting, site selection and asset expansion and acquisition. While the absence of standard costs and variances affirms Hoskin and Macve's narrow interpretation of managerialism, evidence presented refutes their wider, more substantive claim that cost accounting served only mercantile purposes at the US mills.

Reviewed by: Literature, American Style: The Originality of Imitation in the Early Republic by Ezra Tawil Thomas Koenigs (bio) Literature, American Style: The Originality of Imitation in the Early Republic ezra tawil University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018 257 pp. Ezra Tawil’s Literature, American Style traces the transatlantic origins of American literary exceptionalism. The initially counterintuitive, but persuasive, insight at the center of this book is that many of the earliest and most influential arguments for the distinctiveness of American literature were deeply indebted to European, and especially English, aesthetic theories and literary modes. This central argument has a revelatory obviousness to it: when one thinks about it, it is not especially surprising that claims to American originality had European precedents and origins. “Of course,” says the twenty-first-century scholar steeped in recent transatlantic and hemispheric accounts of early US literature, “this idea would have transatlantic origins!” The fact that no one has thought or written about this fact [End Page 245] in a sustained way before, however, suggests the incredible power—even as it has been variously debunked—of the very cultural fantasy of literary Americanness that Tawil analyzes. Literature, American Style undertakes a significant methodological revision in the study of American literature’s distinctiveness by shifting focus from the originality or derivativeness of early US literature to the (much) longer intellectual and literary histories that underpinned the conceptions of originality embraced by these works. Literature, American Style’s accounts of such histories are impressive for both their scope and detail, as Tawil often traces a given aesthetic theory or literary style back to such distant figures as Chaucer, Augustine, or the Ancients, while also tracking how such ideas circulated in the early Republic. Tawil is well aware that a book focused on “what makes American literature American” risks seeming (at best) old-fashioned or (at worst) complicit in the exceptionalism that is its subject. He makes clear at the outset that his ambitions are genealogical: Literature, American Style does not aspire to evaluate the accuracy of early national claims to literary distinctiveness, but to trace and analyze the “fantasy of national originality” (33). One of this book’s significant achievements is to put two opposed lines of criticism—accounts of American literature’s distinctiveness and the transatlantic approaches to American literature that have revised such studies— into a compelling conversation with each other. Literature, American Style argues that neither the venerable “Anglophobia thesis”—the idea that early US culture emerged out of a desire to distance and distinguish itself from Britain—nor the more recent “Anglophilia thesis”—the idea that early US culture is best understood as an attempt to reproduce English culture outside England—can fully capture what Tawil calls the “inverted form of affiliation” that defined early US culture: the very terms on which American writers made their claims to national originality were themselves largely borrowed from British culture. In Tawil’s account, American claims to literary originality “sutured the fantasy of autochthony to the reality of allochthony” by arguing that Englishness itself had been transformed by the American setting (17). This reconceptualization of national literary originality depends on re-framing the question in two distinct, but related, ways. First, Tawil shifts the historical focus from the familiar manifestos of literary nationalism of the 1840s and ’50s to the comparatively “quaint” declarations of national originality from the 1780s and ’90s. This not only allows Literature, American [End Page 246] Style to offer a fresh prehistory of this crucial later moment, but also, far more interestingly, enables it to recover the alternative, less familiar conceptions of literary originality that we often miss because of our own comfort with the conception of originality that predominated in the antebellum period and beyond. Literature, American Style highlights a pre-Romantic conception of originality as repetition with difference rather than radically new or unprecedented creation. The idea of an “original imitation” might seem profoundly paradoxical to modern readers, but, as Tawil convincingly shows, this is exactly how early US writers understood the process of creating a distinctive American literature: they sought to achieve national originality by adapting English materials to the American context. This shift in historical focus is intimately...

Nineteenth century US railroads were the first ‘big businesses’ and had profound influence on society. This paper addresses one source of talent for the early US public accounting profession—railroads. Following the end of the US Civil War (1861–65), industrial expansion was a revolutionary experience, with large trusts appearing in the wake of the railroad's maturing influence on the development of a vast continental economy. Accounting practice also was impacted by railroads. For example, the development of annual reports, income measurement, the standardization of reporting by regulators, developing fixed and variable cost, and throughput concepts for capital intensive business—all were related to the railroads. This paper focuses on a significant link between the emerging public accounting profession and the railroads by examining how an early major US public accounting firm relied upon accounting skill developed within railroads as an important source of talent. Arguably, talent is the most important resource of a professional firm. While it is a commonly held view that the immigration of UK accountants in the late nineteenth century was the source of public accounting talent, this paper provides evidence of a competing explanation—the sourcing of talent from a firm (Haskins & Sells) that continues to the present day as Deloitte. Key leadership and personnel of that time gained their experience while working on the domestic railroads.

Theater; or, Looking beyond Plays and Places Amy E. Hughes (bio) Alas: some readers, having read nothing but my title, are already annoyed with me. This is because many US theater practitioners, professors, and aficionados have surprisingly strong opinions about how "theater" should be spelled. The subject comes up perennially and persistently in articles, blog posts, and conference panels.1 It seems the spelling debate gained considerable rigor in 1962, when the New York Times quietly changed its editorial policy to use theater instead of theatre—even going so far as to "correct" the names of theaters that called themselves Theatres.2 But the dispute can be traced back to 1789, when Noah Webster advocated for a pronunciation-based approach to US spelling in his Dissertations on the English Language. Observing that the spelling of French words had been retained even though they were pronounced differently in English, Webster complained, "Ought [the Americans] at once to reform these abuses, and introduce order and regularity into the orthography of the AMERICAN TONGUE?"3 He answered his own call in the American Dictionary of the English Language (1828), offering postcolonial alternatives to the spellings of many British (cum French) words. When Chauncey A. Goodrich revised Webster's Dictionary in 1847, he formalized this orthographic philosophy by proclaiming in the preface that the re in centre, metre, and other "words of this class" should be transposed.4 But in contrast to centre and metre, the debate over theatre's ending is far from over. As director and theater historian Francis Hodge once observed, "There is an emotional context that surrounds this word that has made and will continue to make a shift to the-er spelling difficult."5 Further [End Page 411] complicating the matter is the insistence by some that theatre and theater are not merely variant spellings but actually two different words, with the former referring to the art form (and, concomitantly, the body of work it generates) and the latter referring to a place where plays are performed.6 I rehearse this history not because it is interesting but because it is revealing: the theater inspires fervent passion, intense loyalty, even cliquish elitism in those who love and study it. Proponents of the idea to embrace both spellings—theatre as play, theater as place—illustrate this most clearly. As architecture and activity, edifice and event, refuge and recreation, the theater is deeply beloved. However, we need more definitions when looking at the nineteenth century, when "the theater" was also a performance practice, a form of labor, and a community. By attending to these connotations, the chaotic complexities of nineteenth-century US theater culture can be seen more clearly: the eclectic amusements staged in playhouses, the diverse work and workers involved in theatrical enterprises, and the dynamic camaraderie that sustained theater/s. Such nuances expose enduring biases in historiography—among them, a tendency to privilege literary legibility over quotidian praxis; a continuing emphasis on the rich, white, and famous; and a benign neglect of the communal processes that shaped nineteenth-century US cultural production. The literature most closely associated with theater is the so-called legitimate drama: narrative-based plays that were professionally produced and/or published. Yet records of actual performances, such as promptbooks marked up by actors and stage managers, suggest that scripts served merely as starting points. Promptbooks exhibit a wide range of alterations—scenes rearranged, large swathes of dialogue omitted, or entire characters removed to meet the needs of a company. Managers frequently reduced five-act plays to four, three, two, or even one act, depending on what the evening's bill would accommodate or what the audience would tolerate. Even promptbooks cannot fully capture what happened on stage. Actors added personal flourishes or "points" to impress the audience, and often, they were "imperfect" in their parts due to last-minute casting changes and the limited time they had to memorize lines. Their improvised dialogue is undocumented, except for scattered anecdotes in diaries and autobiographies. Additionally, many scripts have been completely lost, for the simple reason that they were never intended to be kept. Sassy parodies; saccharine patriotic skits; [End Page 412] slapdash dramatizations of...

US actor-manager Harry Watkins (1825–1894) was no one special. He yearned for fame, but merely skirted the edges of it. If Watkins has any “historical significance” at all, it is because he left behind a voluminous diary in which he chronicled his experiences during the years leading up to the US Civil War. When the author discovered the manuscript in 2008, Watkins’s lackluster became the subject of her research, focused on the question: what could this minor actor reveal about nineteenth-century US culture—a culture as obsessed with fame and achievement as today’s culture? The author argues that Watkins is significant precisely because of his ordinariness, his obscurity, his run-of-the-mill-ness. His experiences illuminate how “white mediocrity” (Koritha Mitchell) works and deepens our understanding of the insidious power of the American Dream. Watkins’s lack of visibility during his lifetime and subsequently suggests that mediocrity is a stigmatized state of being, a form of abjection. His cyclical highs and lows bring into focus the cultural forces that still shape the aspirations of today’s theater artists, and the triumphs and failures that define their (our) inexorably ordinary lives.

Editor’s Note

From the eighteenth through the twentieth century when the US government fluctuated between genocidal and assimilation policies directed at Native American people, non-Native artists frequently depicted images of Native American motherhood. Pictures classicizing Native mothers sanitized acts of violence against Native people, minimized their perceived exoticism, and demonstrated that specifically women had the capacity to assimilate to models of US motherhood. Contradicting this, a number of images also cast skepticism on the potential for Native women to assimilate to US culture and gender norms. Here I discuss how motherhood was politicized in non-Native depictions of Native women and reflected concurrent debates about Native futures in the United States.

‘Culture Is Inseparable from Race’: Culture Wars from Pat Buchanan to Milo Yiannopoulos

 Reviews Browning upon Arabia: A Moveable East. By H A. J. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. . xvii+ pp. £.. ISBN ––––. Hédi A. Jaouad’s Browning upon Arabia is concerned with demonstrating that ‘Browning researched extensively the literature, history, philosophy, and culture of the East, especially the “Arab East,” to produce poetry that is sensitive to its Eastern resources and devoted to confirming the interrelation of Northern and Eastern knowledge’ (p. xii). Browning’s exploration of this ‘interrelation’, Jaouad argues, forgoes ‘traditional binaries’, and contributes to the elaboration of ‘a new form of transcendental humanism’ (p. xii). ‘In Browning’s work’, we learn, ‘the North–East dynamic is a dialogue between equal interlocutors, an intercultural, multilingual conversation’ (p. ). e study collects together a series of perceptive close readings , all of which attempt to discern the influence of Eastern culture in Browning’s writing. Viewing the poet’s works through ‘the metaphor of the arabesque’, Jaouad traces diverse intertextual and interlingual relationships and resonances (p. ). Chapters on the poems ‘rough the Metidja’ and ‘Muléykeh’, and the oen neglected plays e Return of the Druses () and Luria (), form the bulk of the book, and represent its most interesting contributions to a developing critical discussion regarding the complexity of Browning’s engagement with cultural and linguistic difference. e Browning that emerges from Jaouad’s discussion, however, seems ‘more interested in finding cultural commonalities rather than differences’ (p. ). Drawing attention to the many ‘shards and traces of Arab wisdom’ in Browning’s work (p. ), Jaouad adroitly connects the poet’s foregrounding of cultural interaction with the development of a ‘new brand of humanism’ (p. ). e study succeeds in drawing attention to a range of intertextual resonances across Browning’s Eastern poems—including an interesting comparison with Disraeli’s fiction—and is particularly impressive in its demonstration of Browning’s interest in Arabic onomastics . Ultimately, Browning upon Arabia is convincing in its central argument that Browning ‘dissociate[s] himself from the prevailing Orientalist mode of his time’ (p. ), constructing texts motivated, Jaouad suggests, by a desire ‘to give voice and visibility to those misrepresented by the triumphalist North’ (p. ). However, while Jaouad provides a thoughtful, impressively researched, and above all useful survey of Browning’s arabesque, he forgoes exploring in detail the relationship between this aspect of the poet’s intellectual life and the rest of his writing. is could have involved exploring further the relation between Victorian ‘arabesque ’ and ‘grotesque’ literary styles, for example; or even between Browning’s Eastern characters and his general use of historical figures and events to make oblique reference to contemporary politics. e study’s focus has, consequently, the unfortunate and clearly unintended effect of isolating ‘Browning upon Arabia’ from his other writing. Moreover, the study’s use of what Jaouad himself calls ‘structuralist analysis’— most obviously in the reading of ‘rough the Metidja’, ‘à la S/Z’—prevents some of the close readings from fully engaging with more recent theoretical discussions MLR, .,   (p. ). e references to the ‘nagging question of identity and nationality’, for example (p. ); or the suggestion that Browning’s ‘polyphonic, arabesque-like’, and multilingual style anticipates aspects of modernist literary practice (p. ), could have received further elaboration with reference to recent work on Victorian literature’s ‘global’ aesthetics, and translational writing more generally. Jaouad’s book will, however, prove a useful resource to students, scholars, and admirers of Browning’s poetry, and indeed to anyone interested in the manifold networks of cultural affiliation and response evidenced by Victorian literature. Its range of reference and scholarship will undoubtedly lead to the satisfaction of Jaouad’s desire to ‘excite further interest in Browning’s life-long fascination with Eastern religion, culture, and literature’ (p. ). B C, O J H Adulthood and Other Fictions: American Literature and the Unmaking of Age. By S E. Oxford: Oxford University Press. . xii+ pp. £. ISBN ––––. Sari Edelstein’s Adulthood and Other Fictions is a refreshing, thought-provoking excavation of age as an o-overlooked political tool that rose to power in nineteenthcentury US culture. Rather than treating age as a stand-alone discourse, Edelstein shows how age has been instrumental in the enforcement of social hierarchies, including race...

Drawing attention to the work that has been done on celebrity in Britain and America in the nineteenth century, this introduction argues for the importance of exploring the transnational dimensions of celebrity in this era. It underlines and explores the provocative implications of nineteenth-century US culture honouring, celebrating or memorialising European writers, performers and artists at a time when it was attempting to establish its cultural independence from Europe. This introductory essay outlines the insights and nuances offered by the articles in this special issue to current understanding of the popularity, reputations and cultural power of European celebrities in the US and of the nature of transatlantic celebrity. Clarifying the interdisciplinary perspective provided by this collection of essays, this introduction briefly surveys the lives, careers and activities of very different European celebrities who, by appealing to US audiences, enjoyed public recognition as orators, performers, artists, lecturers and writers.

Culinary skill figures as a measure of a woman's self-worth in mid nineteenth-century US culture. For novelists as varied as Fanny Fern, Caroline Howard Gilman, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Augustus Baldwin Longstreet, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Susan Warner, women who cook well serve as moral exemplars while women who cannot face social stigma. By popularizing this extended metaphor, these authors participate in a much larger cultural response to accelerations in industrialization and urbanization. They join the writers of conduct books, domestic manuals and cookbooks in an effort to replace support networks being destroyed by the breakdown of the extended family, modernize old workways superseded by new technology, and stress the importance of the domestic sphere in a period when “work” increasingly meant something that took place outside of the home.

This article investigates the mixing of different symbolic forms in John Carroll Power's 1858 "Diagram and Statistical Record of the Signers of the Declaration of Independence." It argues that the diagram's odd design constitutes an attempt to bring together the symbolic forms of narrative, data, and play to thus highlight and foreground their liminal boundaries and to invite readers to practice exchanging one form for another. In this, the diagram speaks of two important facets of nineteenth-century US culture: a fascination with different symbolic forms and their relationship on the one hand and a desire to use these different forms and their liminality for more democratic forms of representation on the other.

This article investigates the mixing of different symbolic forms in John Carroll Power's 1858 "Diagram and Statistical Record of the Signers of the Declaration of Independence." It argues that the diagram's odd design constitutes an attempt to bring together the symbolic forms of narrative, data, and play to thus highlight and foreground their liminal boundaries and to invite readers to practice exchanging one form for another. In this, the diagram speaks of two important facets of nineteenth-century US culture: a fascination with different symbolic forms and their relationship on the one hand and a desire to use these different forms and their liminality for more democratic forms of representation on the other.