Evert Duyckinck Research Articles

Young America: Dime Novels and Juvenile Authorship

American dime novels, first published under that term in 1860, built on earlier movements in American literary traditions. Critics for over a century have recognised that this popular form emphasised the same sense of literary nationalism strongly at play in the nineteenth century when cultural pundits sought to define and assert a properly American character for so-called “serious” publications. This essay expands that understanding by directly grounding the dime novel within the tenets of the 1830s and 1840s Young America movement, as it formed around the New York circle of Evert Duyckinck. Recovering that heritage stresses how Americanness was intrinsically associated with youth, innovation, and promise. It recovers as well another movement behind the growth and popularity of the dime novel: the juvenile tradition of teenage writers that had flourished in Britain and America at the beginning of the nineteenth century. This tradition found a new form in popular fiction as young writers moved into the new markets of the dime industry. In addition to resituating the dime novel within the debate over what made literature American, augmenting literary history through an attention to the role of juvenile writing expands understandings of the changing definition of authorship. Wide-awake youth figured a new mode of authorship – not so much visionary and romantic as pragmatic, productive, capable.

Poe's “Eureka,” Erasmus Darwin, and Discourses of Radical Science in Britain and America, 1770–1850

Poe's “Eureka,” Erasmus Darwin, and Discourses of Radical Science in Britain and America, 1770–1850

Nathaniel Hawthorne in Context, by Elbert, Monika M., editor.

<i>Nathaniel Hawthorne in Context</i>, by Elbert, Monika M., editor.

An Empire of Print: The New York Publishing Trade in the Early American Republic by Steven Carl Smith

Reviewed by: An Empire of Print: The New York Publishing Trade in the Early American Republic by Steven Carl Smith Joseph M. Adelman (bio) KEY WORDS Print culture, New York City, Evert Duyckinck, Publishing, Bookselling An Empire of Print: The New York Publishing Trade in the Early American Republic. By Steven Carl Smith. (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2017. Pp. 244. Cloth, $99.95.) It is ironic that New York City has often been overlooked as a center of publishing in the early United States, though that distinction is not without reason. The two figures traditionally seen as the dominant publishers of the early republic, Mathew Carey of Philadelphia and Isaiah Thomas of Worcester, each have deep archives of their business records available at libraries with a longstanding commitment to the study of the printing and book trades (the Library Company of Philadelphia and its neighbor, the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, for Carey and the American Antiquarian Society for Thomas). Though plentiful records exist for New York’s major publishers, they are not similarly concentrated. In An Empire of Print, Steven Carl Smith aims to restore New York City to the forefront of the conversation about books in the early United States. Smith complicates Trish Loughran’s argument that the United States lacked a coherent national publishing culture before the 1850s.1 By contrast, An Empire of Print shows how New York’s booksellers and publishers were indeed forging national business ties through which they circulated their books and other printed materials much earlier. Smith [End Page 362] supports this argument through a series of case studies of printers and publishers from the American Revolution to the 1830s. These include Samuel Loudon, one of several Patriot printers forced from the city during the British occupation and State Printer after the war; William Gordon, author of one of the earliest histories of the Revolution; John Ward Fenno, who inherited the Philadelphia Federalist newspaper The Gazette of the United States from his father and then the New York bookshop of Federalist William Cobbett; and Evert Duyckinck, a onetime sailmaker who became the leading book publisher in New York by his retirement in 1830. Through each of these examples—with an additional chapter on the New York literary fair of 1802—Smith shows how New York’s publishers and booksellers fought for competitive advantage within the city and made connections throughout the new nation. Of particular importance in this regard is Duyckinck, whom Smith seeks to elevate as a figure in early U.S. publishing to the same status enjoyed by Carey and Thomas. Using fourteen account books held at the New York Public Library, Smith demonstrates in granular detail how Duyckinck developed a nationwide network of agents to distribute his publishing stock. His network was particularly strong in the South and the trans-Appalachian West. Furthermore, Smith argues, Duyckinck’s connections in the mid-Atlantic and New England challenged the supremacy of the networks operated by Carey and Thomas. The most compelling contribution of An Empire of Print may well be as a showcase for Smith’s meticulous research and analysis of the business records of the book trades. For each case study, Smith processed account books, estate inventories, waste books, and other records into a digestible narrative illustrated with clear and helpful tables. Even for scholars of the printing trade, these records are often difficult to use because they are so often fragmentary, poorly kept, or illegible. Smith’s analysis is a monumental achievement of data analysis that offers a more detailed portrait of the printing trade than any other available study. To offer just one example, Smith combines the account books and estate inventories of John Ward Fenno’s bookstore in tandem with his advertisements for the store to re-create its inventory and thereby demonstrate the ways in which Fenno was trying to establish his store as a space for New York Federalists to gather and discuss literature and politics. Smith also enriches our consideration of how early Americans decided what made a book “American,” building on the conversation of scholars [End Page 363] in such venues as the multi-volume History of the Book in America.2...

Regional Nationalism and the Ends of the Literary World

In this essay I examine the Literary World, the influential literary periodical edited by Evert Duyckinck, to rethink the relationship between region and nation in antebellum cultural geography. I argue that there were multiple literary nationalisms, each a regionally distinctive invocation of nationalist rhetoric on behalf of regional interests that belied rather than represented or advocated a national literature. Subscription records from the Literary World show that literary nationalist rhetoric developed within a feedback loop that reinforced the regional affiliation of both the periodical and its readers. Region emerges as a site of cultural identification, I argue, precisely through this dialectic between textual representations of cultural geography and the way those texts traversed actual geography. In order to understand the consolidation of national circulation and the concept of the nation in the nineteenth-century, we need to re-examine the regional cultural practices that produced them.

An Empire of Print: The New York Publishing Trade in the Early American Republic by Steven Carl Smith

Reviewed by: An Empire of Print: The New York Publishing Trade in the Early American Republic by Steven Carl Smith Ronald J. Zboray Smith, Steven Carl – An Empire of Print: The New York Publishing Trade in the Early American Republic. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2017. Pp. 244. A nation-centered histoire du livre has never really found a foothold in the United States to the degree it has elsewhere, particularly in France, the UK, and, in its own peculiar way, Germany. Among the many possible reasons for this is that book historians of the US have difficulty finding an institutional home, whether [End Page 445] in departments of English or history, or schools of communication, information science, and journalism. Because all these potential support sites are mostly interested in topics other than past print cultures, it is unsurprising that historians of the US book must paint with a very wide brush and, due to a relative lack of prior and ongoing detailed bibliographic work, a very sparse pallet. Many generalizations based on sketchy evidence consequently have been advanced and, for lack of interest in questioning them, allowed to stand uncontested. One of these is that the circulation of imprints in the early republic was not extensive enough to provide a culturally or politically binding force for the young nation. According to this view, any print-assisted cohesion would not occur until at least the 1830s and 1840s with the spread of industrialization and its attendant transportation networks that, as a corollary result, made New York the dominant print communications hub. Steven Carl Smith's An Empire of Print challenges this generalization with an enormous amount of evidence, much of it found in little-consulted manuscript sources of the type that would make many cultural historians blanch: business papers of forgotten figures like Samuel Loudon, William Gordon, and Evert Duyckinck. Smith effectively proves that New York bookmen—indeed, there is nary a "book-woman" in sight in these pages—had developed a considerable network in the years between the American Revolution's end and the final rail-based phase of the transportation revolution. It was these entrepreneurial efforts more than transportation innovations that made New York the nation's publishing capital, according to Smith, and they were in effect much earlier than previously supposed. Smith develops his argument through five chapter-length cases reflecting "government publishing, subscription publishing, the bookshop, the first national literary fair, and the wholesale book trade" (p. 5)—all understudied areas in this time and place. Most of the first chapter on bookseller, library proprietor, and newspaper publisher Samuel Loudon provides background on him, which, however fascinating for showing how he navigated revolutionary turbulence, elides government publishing until its concluding pages (pp. 34-43). Nevertheless, it is in this passage examining Loudon's service as New York State printer that Smith provides the clearest picture of the economics of government printing in this period to date. He can thus highlight the imbrication of printing and state politics in a way that qualifies Trish Loughran's recent attempt in her Print Culture in the Age of U.S. Nation Building, 1770-1870 (2007) to diminish print's centralizing role in the early republic. Smith next turns to Revolutionary War historian William Gordon's subscription publishing initiatives amid his larger authorial marketing push. Once again, the discussion drifts from the main topic at first, but Smith comes through in mid-chapter with an innovative analysis of subscription lists for the London edition of the first volume of Gordon's antidemocratic History of the Rise, Progress, and Establishment, of the Independence of the United States (1788). Smith's occupational rundown of the subscribers points to a largely male professional group of lawyers, ministers, physicians, and Members of Parliament (Britons [End Page 446] unsurprisingly dominate). Little in this anchors Gordon to New York, however, until Smith supports the subscription list findings by comparisons to data from the New York Society Library's charge records for the book, before concluding with a discussion of the dismal fate of a later American subscription edition marshaled by a trio of Gotham booksellers who floated a national marketing campaign. While the...

Melville in His Own Time: A Biographical Chronicle of His Life, Drawn from Recollections, Interviews, and Memoirs by Family, Friends, and Associates ed. by Steven Olsen-Smith

Reviewed by: Melville in His Own Time: A Biographical Chronicle of His Life, Drawn from Recollections, Interviews, and Memoirs by Family, Friends, and Associates ed. by Steven Olsen-Smith Wyn Kelley Steven Olsen-Smith, ed. Melville in His Own Time: A Biographical Chronicle of His Life, Drawn from Recollections, Interviews, and Memoirs by Family, Friends, and Associates Foreword by John Bryant. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2015. l + 205 pp. Steven Olsen-Smith’s book renews hope that discoveries about Melville await us in years to come: not just in papers and collections we have not considered before but in tools that make new readings possible. As General Editor of Melville’s Marginalia Online, Olsen-Smith has pioneered innovative uses of imaging technology to recover lost or fugitive manuscripts. Because of his scholarship, we no longer stop at the blank wall of an erasure or at an explosion of inky lines and blots. That crossed-out comment in Evert Duyckinck’s diary? The one that says Melville is “cheerful company [three lines inked over:] without being very fluent or original and models his writing evidently a great deal on Washington Irving” (29–30)? Fully exposed in the light of Olsen-Smith’s editorial laser beam. In this book, however, Olsen-Smith necessarily exhibits less of the technological wizardry of his Melville’s Marginalia Online editing and more of the interpretive confidence and brilliance that have grown out of that work. For here he assembles published materials as well as manuscripts, new names as well as familiar ones, and also full transcriptions with even fuller contexts: the complete Albany Microscope correspondence of the Philo Logos Society, with new confirmation by William Moses in 1858; multiple accounts of the Monument Mountain climbs of 1850 and 1851 by Cornelius Mathews (1850), Evert Duyckinck (1850 and 1851), Sarah Huyler Morewood (1852), James T. Fields (1862), and Henry Dwight Sedgwick II (1895), reflecting on each other with various cross-lights; overlapping and often conflicting accounts of the Berkshire years by Nathaniel, Sophia, and Julian Hawthorne; and appraisals of Melville’s writing and character starting in the 1850s and continuing for more than a century. Olsen-Smith’s headnotes emphasize that many of these materials appear for the first time in their entirety, with new transcriptions by him or by Hershel Parker (for the New Melville Log), or with new research that [End Page 108] establishes their significance. Many have appeared in biographies before, with the biographer’s narrative to frame them. But in his emphasis on “testimony by individuals who personally knew or encountered Melville, or who conveyed testimony by such individuals” (xxxii), Olsen-Smith also directs the spotlight to materials that might not previously have met a biographer’s standards of accuracy: for example, early accounts of Melville’s life by the Duyckinck brothers, Charles Hemstreet, Theodore Wolfe, J. E. A. Smith, and others who circulated popular myths and falsehoods, including the almost universal belief that Melville’s sea novels were strictly autobiographical. With such fidelity to Melville’s witnesses, rather than to scholars, biographers, or (except for a handful of intimates) even close friends, Olsen-Smith runs risks: one of redundancy, or the piling up of multiple, possibly unedifying, descriptions of the same obvious features of Melville’s life; and another of incompleteness, in that witnesses caught noticing Melville lack the insight of trained biographers and informed readers. Indeed, this book is filled with splendid redundancy and glorious incompleteness, crammed with sometimes hasty or uninformed judgments. In that sense it provides a fresh and wondrous view of someone who was not yet, nor always, remarkable. In the very care and accuracy with which Olsen-Smith edits and assembles his materials, he avoids creating the coherent study of Melville that many readers crave. Instead he invites readers to reconsider multiple vexed questions about Melville the man and writer. Perhaps the knottiest of these questions concerns Melville’s reputed decline into depression, alcoholism, violence, insanity, or simply irrelevance. In some ways the book seems to be structured around the problem of Melville’s moods—Jolly Melville or Grouchy Melville or Timid and Nervous Melville. Questions abound. In youth, was he fearless, energetic, abundant with...

Heggie &amp; Scheer’s Moby-Dick: A Grand Opera for the 21 st Century by Robert K. Wallace (review)

Reviewed by: Heggie & Scheer’s Moby-Dick: A Grand Opera for the 21st Century by Robert K. Wallace David Mence Robert K. Wallace Heggie & Scheer’s Moby-Dick: A Grand Opera for the 21st Century Forward by Jake Heggie and Gene Scheer. Photography by Karen Almond. Denton: University of North Texas Press, 2013. xii + 224 pages. On May 10, 1849, at the Astor Place Opera House in New York City—mere blocks from where the Melvilles lived at 103 Fourth Avenue—William Charles Macready was due to take to the stage as Macbeth. The renowned English Shakespearean was, however, prevented from treading the boards by what Dennis Berthold describes in American Literature as an angry mob of “ten to fifteen thousand working-class New Yorkers [who] gathered outside the Opera House and pelted it with bricks and stones.” Twenty-two people were killed and thirty-eight injured that night when the National Guard arrived on the scene and opened fire on the crowd. Melville had already signed a petition alongside local literati Washington Irving, Cornelius Mathews, and Evert Duyckinck (although not the canny James Fenimore Cooper), urging Macready to continue his run despite catcalls and rotten eggs. Melville’s signature on the Macready petition was, Berthold writes, the next “logical step in his increasing identification with the cultural aspirations of the Whig elite, aspirations that centred on opera, Shakespeare, and Astor Place.” Imagine Melville’s reaction, then, were he to be told that his “whaling voyage by one Ishmael” would one day be transformed into a Grand Opera with ambitions to rival Mozart, Verdi, and Wagner? Or that his beloved Whale—commissioned by a consortium of companies from Dallas, Adelaide, San Francisco, San Diego, and Calgary—would receive its world premiere on April 30, 2010, at the newly built, multimillion dollar Winspear Opera House in Dallas, Texas? The story of Jake Heggie and Gene Scheer’s Moby-Dick begins in 2005. Dallas Opera’s Jonathan Pell asked Heggie to write a work to inaugurate the Winspear Opera House, then under construction. Heggie nominated Melville’s vast, sprawling Whale as the tale he wanted to tell. (Heggie credits librettist Terrence McNally who reportedly said, “The only story I am interested in doing is Moby-Dick” [12]. McNally had to withdraw from the project and Scheer was brought on as librettist.) Choosing Moby-Dick signaled that this opera would [End Page 106] be definitively American, one that would speak back to the grand European tradition in its own voice. But what might such an opera sound like? American music is often associated with the American Songbook, in which classical harmonies mix with gospel, blues, ragtime, jazz, and Broadway tunes, epitomized by the likes of George Gershwin, Irving Berlin, and Cole Porter. It is most decidedly not an operatic idiom. Reviews of the Moby-Dick opera, some of which are collated at the end of the book, suggest ongoing confusion over whether the Great American Opera should sound American, European, or like a mixture of the two. While some reviewers celebrated “sonic seascapes to stand beside those of Beethoven and Mendelssohn and Wagner” and declared that “Moby-Dick is the evidence that great American operas are beginning to emerge,” others complained of a “musical language [that] is conservative and song-based” and lamented an absence of “wrenching dissonance,” such that the “overall tone of the opera is too upbeat for the subject” (217). Moby-Dick is a work that needs no introduction in these pages. But stop and think for a moment about the challenge it presents to would-be adapters. The product of a restless, skeptical imagination, it roams across genres (poetic, dramatic, artistic, scientific) and contains digressions enough to make Holden Caulfield look like the kind of guy who gets straight to the point. It is a work that speaks both backward and forward in time: to Plato, the Bible, and Shakespeare, as well as to Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon, and The Simpsons (I still chuckle at the scene where the old sea captain, Horatio McCallister, slams down the telephone and growls, “Call me back, Ishmael”). To compress Moby-Dick into something that can be “acted and sung in...

Poe in Cyberspace Technology, Magic, and Quack Physics

Poe in Cyberspace Technology, Magic, and Quack Physics

Writers, Editors, and Intellectual Exchange Between the Antebellum North and South

Writers, Editors, and Intellectual Exchange Between the Antebellum North and South Jonathan Daniel Wells (bio) In september 1993, as ann arbor, michigan’s ample treescape began to reveal leaves of yellow, orange, and fiery red, I met for the first time my mentor at the University of Michigan. J. Mills Thornton III was kind and welcoming, but the competitive graduate student environment of which I was already aware made me anxious about impressing my new professor. Fortunately, as we talked about mutual interests, Mills and I hit upon a common bond: for both of us, William R. Taylor’s 1961 classic study of antebellum literature and politics, Cavalier and Yankee, was a favorite read. We appreciated Taylor’s examination of famous antebellum literati like James Fenimore Cooper, William Gilmore Simms, and Ralph Waldo Emerson as well as more obscure authors like James Kirke Paulding, William Alexander Caruthers, Evert Duyckinck, and Nathaniel Beverley Tucker. Still today I marvel at Taylor’s ability to join novels, periodical literature, and political writings to reveal how Americans in both North and South viewed their pasts. Taylor’s openness to examining southern authors ran counter to the wisdom prevailing for much of the early twentieth century about the quality of writers and thinkers in the slave states. Scholars often dismissed the intellectual culture of the South as irrelevant and undeveloped, remarking, as W. J. Cash once wrote, that the South really had no mind, merely a temperament. In one of the more famous passages of The Mind of the South (1941), Cash argued that “leaving Mr. Jefferson aside, the whole South produced, not only no original philosopher but no derivative one to set beside Emerson [End Page 113] and Thoreau; no novelist but poor Simms to measure against the Northern galaxy headed by Hawthorne and Melville and Cooper… no poet deserving the name save Poe – only half a Southerner.”1 Rejecting Cash’s characterization of southern intellectual life, historians such as Michael O’Brien have shown that southerners were attuned to literary developments emanating from the North and Europe, and that these men and women participated actively in a transatlantic and interregional intellectual culture.2 No longer could apologists for proslavery ideology claim that white southerners were somehow detached or isolated from western intellectual and literary trends. White southerners knew well the European and northern criticisms of slavery; southerners simply chose to swim against the powerful antislavery currents created by authors like Emerson, Thoreau, and Dickens.3 Strangely, even as white southerners maintained a strict silence on the questioning of slavery, and violently denounced northern and European writers who veered into antislavery commentary, white southern thinkers were often willing to lay aside their differences with northern intellectuals over bondage. In fact, the intellectual ties that northern and southern writers and editors created in the antebellum period were important to the development of literary and print culture in both regions. For much of the antebellum era, northern and southern writers placed their professional and personal relationships with each other above the national divide over slavery. As Taylor understood, analyzing the personal and intellectual connections between northern and southern authors can help us appreciate the nuanced ways that antebellum Americans themselves understood sectionalism and the coming of the Civil War. [End Page 114] Despite hailing from different regions and adhering to conflicting ideas about the justice of bondage, shared experiences in print culture united northern and southern intellectuals. Writers in both sections, for example, believed that they were engaged in a common endeavor to convince a fickle reading public that American authors and themes were worth celebrating. Both Cooper and Simms set their novels in American towns and farms populated with American characters. Resenting the haughty superiority maintained by British observers, northern and southern authors united in a common endeavor to bring their nation’s past into fiction. Intellectuals in both regions also complained bitterly about publishers who failed to honor contracts, and about being unappreciated by critics and readers alike. These common experiences were the foundation of close personal as well as professional relationships that proved remarkably strong over the antebellum decades. While not all such relationships between northern and southern authors remained unscathed by...

Robert S. Levine, Dislocating Race and Nation: Episodes in Nineteenth-Century American Literary NationalismDislocating Race and Nation: Episodes in Nineteenth-Century American Literary Nationalism. Robert S. Levine. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008. Pp. x+322.

<i>Robert S. Levine</i>, Dislocating Race and Nation: Episodes in Nineteenth-Century American Literary Nationalism<i>Dislocating Race and Nation: Episodes in Nineteenth-Century American Literary Nationalism</i>. Robert S. Levine. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008. Pp. x+322.

The Remains of Friendship and the Ethics of Misreading: Melville, Emerson, Thoreau

The Remains of Friendship and the Ethics of Misreading: Melville, Emerson, Thoreau Naomi Morgenstern (bio) There is no friendship nor justice towards lifeless things. —Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics Is it possible, without setting off loud protests on the part of militants of an edifying or dogmatic humanism, to think and to live the gentle rigour of friendship, the law of friendship qua the experience of a certain ahumanity? —Jacques Derrida, Politics of Friendship (1997) In chapter 39 of The Confidence-Man (1857), the “hypothetical friend,” Charlie Noble, ostentatiously dismisses Frank Goodman’s request for financial assistance: “The negotiation of a loan is a business transaction,” Charlie tells Frank, “and I will transact no business with a friend.”1 Herman Melville’s brief chapter proceeds to unfold the perverse logic of a philosophy of friendship that realizes itself most profoundly in the refusal to heed the friend’s cry for help. According to Melville’s fictional philosopher, Mark Winsome (as glossed by his fictional disciple Egbert), to come to the friend’s assistance is immediately to annul the friendship, to violate “the delicacy of the connection” (CM, 206). Beginning with Carl Van Vechten’s 1922 study, readers have been encouraged to construe such scenes as proof that The Confidence-Man is Melville’s “great transcendental [End Page 241] satire” and Mark Winsome his witty and critical stand-in for Ralph Waldo Emerson. “Emerson’s fatuous essay on Friendship,” wrote Van Vechten, “is required preparatory reading for this book.”2 But this approach to The Confidence-Man ought to be tempered—if not significantly complicated—by Melville’s comments to Evert Duyckinck in March of 1849 (“Yet I think Emerson is more than a brilliant fellow).”3 As this letter (and any extended consideration of his work) makes clear, Melville always preferred the Emersonian “fool” over the many representatives of what he called philosophical “mediocrity”: “I love all men who dive,” wrote Melville. “Any fish can swim near the surface, but it takes a great whale to go down stairs five miles or more” (C, 121).4 Melville’s take on Emersonian friendship deserves to be reconsidered, and we might begin by reading The Confidence-Man’s serio-comic account of friendship’s “transactions” alongside an apparently antithetical scene from “Bartleby, the Scrivener” (1853). In a moment of desperation, Melville’s lawyer-narrator tries to buy his way out of an unbearable relationship: “‘Good-bye, Bartleby; I am going—good-bye, and God some way bless you; and take that,’ slipping something in his hand. But it dropped upon the floor, and then,—strange to say—I tore myself from him whom I had so longed to be rid of.”5 No doubt a subterranean humor always threatens to break through the surface of this story too, but few readers would be willing to write it off as satire. In fact, there is ample evidence to suggest that “Bartleby” may well be one of the most philosophically provocative stories in the American literary tradition. Refusing any give or take, Melville’s idiosyncratic friends perform (as farce or tragedy) what might be called the impossibilities of friendship.6 Is the friend he or she who needs nothing from me, who “want[s] nothing” to say to me, to use Bartleby’s enigmatic closing words to the lawyer (“B,” 43)? Does exchange ruin equality? Is friendship a relationship without exchange, without economy, without debt? Without even a gift? But what kind of friendship would that be? How could we ever know that such a friendship has taken place? Such questions might provoke anxious amusement among certain readers of The Confidence-Man, but they also belong to a rich discourse on [End Page 242] ethics and friendship that, I would argue, brings Melville and his transcendentalist contemporaries (Emerson and Thoreau) into dialogue with much current work at the intersection of literature and philosophy.7 For those who buy into Van Vechten’s account of transcendental friendship, Melville’s fictional Emersonian engages in a “grotesque inversion of Jesus’ injunctions to lend to anyone, not merely ‘to them of whom ye hope to receive.’”8 But anyone looking to Melville for a reassuringly familiar Christian ethical philosophy will...

The Ethnologists' Bookshop: Bartlett &amp; Welford in 1840s New York

Previous articleNext article No AccessThe Ethnologists' Bookshop: Bartlett & Welford in 1840s New YorkRobert L. GunnRobert L. Gunn Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Wordsworth Circle Volume 41, Number 3Summer 2010The International Conference of Romanticism: 2009 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/TWC24043707 Views: 3Total views on this site © 2010 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Virtual Americas: Transnational Fictions and the Transatlantic Imaginary (review)

Reviewed by: Virtual Americas: Transnational Fictions and the Transatlantic Imaginary Óscar Fernández (bio) Virtual Americas: Transnational Fictions and the Transatlantic Imaginary. By Paul Giles. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2002. xiii + 337 pp. $22.95. In Virtual Americas: Transnational Fictions and the Transatlantic Imaginary, Paul Giles defines virtualization as the contingencies of perception in electronic and digital media where the interface between original and replica has been "eliminated" (11). Most telling in Giles's definition is how "virtualization" is associated with culture and capital and how this link is helpful [End Page 336] in analyzing the classic phase of American studies. In reading Las Vegas as the city of virtuality and of abundance, Giles argues how American fictions of abundance connect with philosophical idealism and how American capitalism and transcendentalism function by "'virtualizing' natural phenomena into their shadow or replica" (12). Giles's overall project is to "virtualize" America and analyze the processes that have helped construct mythologies of nationalism and of American exceptionalism. In reading together works by Frederick Douglass, Herman Melville, Henry James, Robert Frost, Vladimir Nabokov, Thomas Pynchon and poets such as Thom Gunn and Sylvia Plath, Giles juxtaposes American cultural narratives with those of Europe and examines the national mythologies framing these narratives. By "virtualizing" America, Giles demonstrates how "indigenous representations of the 'natural'" function as tautologies without "reference to anything outside their own charmed circle" (2). Besides analyzing mythologies of nation formation, an important focus of Virtual Americas is to establish an alternative genealogy for American studies, one that is informed by transnational and transcultural forces and by the seemingly homogeneous construction of American studies of the 1950s and 1960s. Giles's chapter, "Narrative Reversals and Power Exchanges: Frederick Douglass and British Culture," successfully argues how the three autobiographies of Douglass (Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, 1845; My Bondage and My Freedom, 1855; Life and Times, 1882, revised 1883) and the work of William Lloyd Garrison's abolitionist movement demystify Britain's perception of being an antislavery power. Comparing the plight of the oppressed in both the United States and in Britain shows the "explicit violence" in both American and British societies and the transatlantic plight of the oppressed (46). Giles analyzes the parallel histories of labor in both continents, as exemplified by Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South (1855) and its rhetoric of a divided England, and concludes that Douglass's biographies unsettled the myth of England's labor and social unity by mirroring the North/South conflict in postbellum United States. Especially interesting is chapter 3, "'Bewildering Intertanglement': Melville's Engagement with British Tradition." This chapter provides a welcomed re-reading of Melville's canonical texts and traces alternative genealogies for reading Melville's work, especially in terms of what Giles considers to be Melville's project of comparing "American slavery of race with British slavery of class" (58). Moreover, Giles demonstrates how his parodic writing helps explain the general discomfort of British critics reading Melville after the Second World War. In addition to highlighting the way in which the [End Page 337] composition of Moby Dick (1851) was intrinsically connected with British literature (Melville, for example, based his style for Moby Dick on Thomas Carlyle's Sartor Resartus, a book he borrowed from Evert Duyckinck's library in July 1850), Giles shows how Melville's interaction with British culture and literary models was parodic and intertextual instead of oppositional. Pierre (1852), for example, shows how the genealogy of aristocratic England is no less arbitrary than that of demagogical America. Especially useful for scholars is Giles's reading of "masking" in works such as The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade (1857). In Melville's last novel, "masking" not only instrumentalizes deception for a confidence-man working the river economy of the Mississippi, but in Giles's reading "masking" also dismantles global rather than regional forms of class and of capital. Throughout Virtual Americas, Giles shows the importance of making the canonical seem foreign and estranged. In the case of Melville, American literature works to aestheticize British literature by showing how its literary conventions are an "elaborate masquerade . . . made different by the advent of American culture, which opens up an alternative...

Herman Melville, Immortality, St. Paul, and Resurrection: FromRose-BudtoBilly Budd

Pequod Meets the Chapter 91 of Herman Melville's Moby-Dick, second mate Stubb swindles the inexperienced French captain of the Bouton-de-Rose out of blasted but extremely valuable whale carcass. The chapter opens with an epigraph from Sir Thomas Browne's Vulgar Errors: In vain it was to rake for Ambergriese the paunch of this Leviathan, fetor denying inquiry (402). the next chapter, however, Stubb does just by probing the purloined whale's bowels for ambergris, the precious substance of fine perfumes. As Stubb proceeds with his inquiry, Ishmael soliloquizes over the marvelous reversal of olfactory sensations this insufferable fetor: Now the incorruption of this most fragrant ambergris should be found the heart of such decay; is this nothing? Bethink thee of saying of St. Paul Corinthians about corruption and incorruption; how we are but glory (409; 1 Cor. 15:42-43). Gordon Poole argues the name of this foul-smelling French ship was private joke between Nathaniel Hawthorne and Melville about the malodorous diapers of Hawthorne's baby daughter Rose, nicknamed Rosebud at her birth on 20 May 1851, when Melville was deep into the writing of his great sea story. On basis as well as on etymological surmises, Poole claims the encounter with the Rose-Bud gives bawdy, grossly impudent, ironic twist to St. Paul's homily (13). While Poole finds this seemingly minor and dispensable encounter sown dishonor, his scatological interpretation ignores the less urgent but infinitely more momentous end of humankind signaled by raised glory Ishmael's Pauline homily. St. Paul's preachments upon resurrection and immortality 1 Corinthians, evoked Ishmael by the spoils of the Rose-Bud, hounded Melville for lifetime, eventually suggesting late-blooming roses symbolic eschatology. Melville's early commercial success as writer of South Sea experiences whetted his appetite for literary immortality, but after Omoo he wanted to spring free of the restraints imposed by John Murray, his English publisher whose Home and Colonial Library published only works of true adventures. Melville's breakout effort at telling different kind of truth was Mardi, voyage of the mind he hoped would earn him both fame and commercial success. By the time he presented copy to his literary friend Evert Duyckinck, however, he already knew Mardi had failed, for he likened it to tropical may possibly--by some miracle, is--flower like the aloe, hundred years hence---or not at all, which is more likely by far, for some aloes never flower (Correspondence 154). Whether or not literary immortality would ever come, he refused to court transient fame based upon his experiences as a man who lived among the cannibals, as he wrote to Hawthorne (Correspondence 193). Pressed by family responsibilities and the birth of his first child, Melville after Mardi resumed writing of his salt-water experiences because dollars damned him, and quick succession he produced Redburn and Whitejacket before setting off to Europe 1849, ostensibly to get more favorable terms for future publications England. Upon returning to New York on 1 February 1850, he plunged into writing about whaling, material he had skirted his five previous books. Then, after escaping to the Berkshires summer, he discovered Hawthorne--first, as the author of Mosses from an Old Manse, about which he wrote rhapsodic review for Duyckinck's Literary World; and, second, as neighbor living but six miles away. June of 1851, when Moby-Dick was in his flurry Melville wrote Hawthorne he did not think of Fame, year ago, as I do now; [is] the most transparent of all vanities; All Fame is patronage; and he blustered, Let me be infamous; there is no patronage that (Correspondence 192-93). …

YOUNG AMERICAN PUNS: ANTEBELLUM WORDPLAY AND DEMOCRATIC MANHATTAN

�� In 1845, a small group of New York Democrats announced themselves “Young Americans” and so began a new phase in a campaign on behalf of their nation’s literature. Founding members Evert Duyckinck, Jerry Auld, William Jones, and Russell Trevett had banded together as early as 1836 to argue that our domestic letters surpassed Europe’s. By the middle of the next decade, their nationalist rhetoric had reached fever pitch. As essayists and editors based in antebellum Manhattan, they kept their cultural critique on the front pages of the city’s magazines and newspapers. Long-term aims were a bit vague but seemed to hinge upon the domestic production and democratic dissemination of truly American belles lettres. The highprofile nature of its message has earned the group a spot in recent literary histories (Miller 1956; Bender 1988; Widmer 1999). Less noted has been Young America’s contribution to American speech. Part of that contribution stems from what I call the Young American

Evert Duyckinck and the History of Wiley and Putnam's Library of American Books, 1845-1847

Evert Duyckinck and the History of Wiley and Putnam's Library of American Books, 1845-1847

The School of Hawthorne (review)

Book Reviews 287 Richard H. Brodhead. The School of Hawthorne. New York: Oxford U P, 1986. 215 pp. pb $11.95. Taking Hawthorne as Üie always canonical American novelist, the "great concatenator ," who above all others "pulls disparate writing into a coherent and continuous line," Richard Brodhead treats Üie "school of Hawthorne" as a paradigm of literary tradition. Into his theory of literary infuence Brodhead incorporates concepts such as the construction of authorship, canon formation and the sacralization of "high" culture, the role of social mediation in die history of taste, and, most important of all, the various social and historical constructions of whatever has passed into the past. His School of Hawthorne demonstrates that from among potential versions of past events, institutions construct, deconstruct, and reconstruct usable pasts in a dynamic series of creative revisionings. In studying how die past passes and is selectively recovered for new uses, how yesterday's rebellion becomes today's orthodoxy, Brodhead contributes a social dimension to Emerson's American scholarship of "creative reading." Rather than lament mat institutions were built on Hawthorne's tropes, Brodhcad finds that Üie past renews itself primarily by "continuing adaptation within" cultural insitituitons. He uses the vicissitudes of Hawthorne's reputation to demonstrate that "traditions can be reclaimed from institutional possession and made plastic again to their inheritors' wishes and needs." Brodhead starts his historical demonstration with the influential magazine industry and the canny promotional strategies of the publishing firm Ticknor and Fields that enabled Evert Duyckinck and James T. Fields to construct the public Hawthorne as an emblem of "high culture." In this process of commodification, high and low culture were separated into different marketplaces, and novels were elevated into new prominence as high art. Regrettably, üie analysis does not consider whatever ideas, influences, or models Nathaniel Hawthorne used to create himself as author. In this study of authorial selfcreation , the "founder" is himself without visible foundation except as a creation of his promoters. We must look elsewhere to learn how Hawthorne dealt with his uneasy assumption of authorhood and with his sense of failure. Reviewing the development of American literary historiography, Brodhead traces the different Hawthornes that time uncovered, a line composed of many separate strands, such as his symbolism, his plots, his character types (especially the daimonically obsessed ones), his theories about romance, and his conception of authorship. Drawing upon such a wide and open-ended range of Hawthornes, Brodhcad allows himself considerable breadth in defining a "school" of Hawthorne, a body that comprises novelists significandy influenced by him. Primarily, Brodhead is interested in those authors whose works show a deep "knowing" of Hawthorne, rather than those like Frederic, Crane, or Dreiser who allude to him in superficial ways. Once canonized by social institutions, Nathaniel Hawthorne was appropriated for various purposes by Herman Melville (no big surprise, but beautifully depicted), William Dean HoweUs (the big surprise), and, of course, Henry James, but all in different ways at different times. So prompt and successful was the canonization of Nathaniel Hawthorne, according to Brodhead, that later in life Hawthorne had to contend with himself as his own strong precursor, a presence so intimidating that it prevented him from achieving a final climactic phase to his authorial career. Brodhead attributes the weakness of Hawthorne's late fiction to this kind of anxiety radier than to illness or changing literary ideals. As Hawthorne's successors, Melville found or invented a prophetic Nay-sayer, HoweUs an august representative of high culture, Jewett and Freeman a license to create "supercharged monomanics," and James, among a great many other debts, the example by which he constructed his own idea of "achieved authorship." Very informative about 288 The Henry James Review the way changing times and social institutions elicited various aspects of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Brodhead underplays the psychological differences that also influenced what successors took from Hawthorne. In addition to what the changing canon served up to MelviUe, James, or Faulkner as appropriate models, we want to know what level of their personalities responded to what level of Nathaniel Hawthorne's personality. Brodhead provides some very fine readings of Hawthorne's works, often extending critical commonplaces into new intensity and enlightening new applications...

Melville's White-Jacket: Sovereignty in the American Polity of Displacement

Herman Melville the man was a democrat given to patrician nostalgia for an American aristocracy. Melville the writer entered into a grammar of the American political culture which disclosed the structural origins of these mixed aspirations. White-Jacket (1850), his allegorical documentary fiction chronicling the abuses committed aboard ships of the U.S. Navy, uses the metaphor of the ship of state as a means to uncover the hidden structures of America's complex relationship to the Old World. The novel illustrates, better than any other fiction Melville wrote, how the America of 1850, though independent, was still ensnared in a historical process belonging to European culture. Melville's narrator-protagonist, White-Jacket, becomes the hybrid representative of a nation which was itself a liminalized political space caught between the historical traditions of the Old World and the typological destiny of the New. Beneath the surface of Melville's allegory lie the deep structures of an America expressing itself in discordant languages of self-realization.1 'Evert Duyckinck, among Mellville's early readers, struck closest to the underlying concern of White-Jacket in his review for The Literary World. He saw in the metaphorical thrust of the "world in a man-of-war" an underlying principle of fragmentation. Beyond the separation of the ship's all-male crew from women, Duyckinck perceived in Melville's new novel a "divorce" of greater implication: "The man-of-war is divorced from civilization,—and we will not repeat the stale phrase, from the progress of humanity,—but from humanity itself. How thus divorced, through all the windings and intricacies of the artificial system White-Jacket will show."2 Both Duyckinck's observation and Melville's metaphor of the ship of state are acutely American. For precisely what constitutes the divorce, the break-away from "civilization," and how it occurs in history are factors that inspired Melville to construct a version of the American polis. The Neversink is the political anatomy of a culture which in 1850 retained at its center the paradoxical tension between a historical society of severed ties and a typological destiny of restored human harmony.

Phillis Wheatley's Use of Classicism

1ERHAPs because Phillis Wheatley was not only the first Black American to publish a volume of poems, but also the second American woman to do so, critics too exclusively use her example for the premise of socioanthropological argument. Rarely have they noted the esthetic merit of the young slave girl's writing, still less frequently her classical learning. Flourishing just before the American Revolution, Wheatley wrote poetry filled with classical allusions, including her own variations upon the theme of Niobe. George and Evert Duyckinck remarked in their popular Cyclopaedia of American Literature (i866) that the interpolation of a line at one point in her rendering of Ovid would do honor to any pen. Indeed it does; Wheatley's line intensifies the wrath of Apollo, preparing to avenge an insult to his mother Latona by slaughtering all fourteen of Niobe's children: