Nineteenth-Century American Research Articles

The Public Address and the Rhetoric of Science: Henry Rowland, Epideictic Speech, and Nineteenth-Century American Science

The public address about scientific practice is an understudied genre in the scholarship on the rhetoric of science. Recent scholarship has studied expert-to-layperson addresses but not the relationship between addresses and other science writing. This article analyzes a scientific article and two speeches by Henry Rowland, the first chair of Physics at The Johns Hopkins University, and investigates how the public address supports and develops scientific ethos. Scientific ethos is developed through the genres of the scientific article and the public address, which delineates the mental activities that are presented through more commonly studied rhetorical activities in the scientific article.

“A Bold and Hardy Race of Men”: The Lives and Literature of American Whalemen by Jennifer Schell, and: Antebellum at Sea: Maritime Fantasies in Nineteenth-Century America by Jason Berger (review)

Reviewed by: “A Bold and Hardy Race of Men”: The Lives and Literature of American Whalemen by Jennifer Schell, and: Antebellum at Sea: Maritime Fantasies in Nineteenth-Century America by Jason Berger Amy Parsons Jennifer Schell “A Bold and Hardy Race of Men”: The Lives and Literature of American Whalemen Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2013. xiv + 262 pp. Jason Berger Antebellum at Sea: Maritime Fantasies in Nineteenth-Century America Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012. x + 338 pp. These two recent books on antebellum American maritime literature share a question about fantasy: both ask how the cultural fantasies about common sailors functioned in the nineteenth-century imagination even when these were at odds with the actual lives and working conditions of maritime laborers. Schell looks to a large archive of whaling narratives to examine their investment in an idealization of working-class masculinity that valued production, autonomy, and physical skill over attributes such as the restraint and formal education associated with the middle and upper classes. She writes that these “fantasies—even those that proved to be unrealistic or that could be easily discredited—were compelling because they provided physical laborers with a useful way of understanding their lives and their national significance” (17). Berger’s explicitly Lacanian study examines maritime narratives to establish the “significant political relationship among fantasy, desire, and maritime experience in antebellum America” (2). As in Schell’s analysis, maritime narratives offered nineteenth-century Americans a way to make sense of a complex cultural landscape. Berger’s aim is to do more than show how maritime literature reconciled and complicated these complexities or how they misrepresented historical facts to advance the work of capital, nation, and empire. After all, fantasies rarely diminish in power by one’s “simply . . . coming to some epiphany about the illusory nature of one’s ideas” (Berger 138). Berger’s Lacanian framework allows him to illuminate the function of maritime fantasies in national discourse, what he identifies as their “social and [End Page 99] ideological work, as opposed to social and ideological content” (11). Although these studies are methodologically and stylistically distinct, taken together they provide significant insights into the centrality of maritime literature in the antebellum national imagination. Schell opens with the claim that despite recent interdisciplinary interest in maritime literature, even the most significant studies have tended to treat their objects of study “monolithically” (xi), without differentiating between types of nautical work and how the specificity of that work might affect the writing and reception of maritime narratives. Schell looks to an extensive archive of works related to the whaling industry, which were shaped by the centrality of economic production as opposed to combat or exchange, the focus of narratives about the naval and merchant services. In order to explore the “thematic, symbolic, and artistic complexity” (xii) of whaling narratives, Schell traces a historical arc that begins in the late eighteenth century with Crèvecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer and ends in the late nineteenth century, throughout which American whalemen were transformed into exemplary “romantic heroes,” representatives of a particular kind of idealized American masculinity (4). Borrowing the term “producerism” from Robert Westbrook, and situating herself explicitly in the fields of labor history and masculinity studies, Schell builds her analysis around the concept of “producerist fantasies.” These fantasies have their roots in Revolutionary-era rhetoric, which valorized agrarian and artisanal modes of production as the keys to America’s future success. She connects the specialized work of whaling, which remained fairly constant even as other sectors of the economy mechanized, to these early valorizations of productive labor. In the public imagination, whalers also possessed a set of specialized physical skills requiring bravery, independence, and strength, which transformed nature into valuable products that increased the wealth and prestige of the industry and the nation. In the terms of this fantasy, the whaleman was not just an exemplary worker but also an exemplary American man, as these narratives were often meditations on national values and identity. The most dominant forms of “producerist fantasies” around whalemen did not entirely exclude other ways of writing about the industry; however, according to Schell these fantasies were flexible and powerful enough to absorb...

Brothers and Sisters: Incest as Empowerment in Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Novels

In The Power of Sympathy, by William Hill Brown, published in 1789, the protagonist Harrington initially intends to seduce Harriot, a beautiful and charming girl beneath him in social status, but h...

Book Review: Rico, Nature’s Noblemen: Transatlantic Masculinities and the Nineteenth-Century American West, by Ron Tyler

Book Review: Rico, Nature’s Noblemen: Transatlantic Masculinities and the Nineteenth-Century American West, by Ron Tyler

Meaningful Places: Landscape Photographers in the Nineteenth-Century American West. By Rachel McLean Sailor. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2014. 240pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, and index. Cloth $45.00.

<i> Meaningful Places: Landscape Photographers in the Nineteenth-Century American West. </i> By Rachel McLean Sailor. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2014. 240pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, and index. Cloth $45.00.

Speaking of Religion in Nineteenth-Century American Literature

Speaking of Religion in Nineteenth-Century American Literature Brian Yothers COLEMAN, DAWN. Preaching and the Rise of the American Novel. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2013. ix + 293 pp. $69.95 hardcover. GOLDBERG, SHARI. Quiet Testimony: A Theory of Witnessing in Nineteenth-Century American Literature. New York: Fordham University Press, 2013. viii + 197 pp. $45.00 hardcover; $33.99 ebook. KEVORKIAN, MARTIN. Writing Beyond Prophecy: Emerson, Hawthorne, and Melville After the American Renaissance. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2013. xviii + 259 pp. $45.00 hardcover. The nineteenth-century American novel is sufficiently saturated in religious discourse that criticism often begins by taking the religious dimensions of novels from this period for granted, or else by observing religious allusions in passing on the way to more pressing matters. Dawn Coleman’s Preaching and the Rise of the American Novel, Martin Kevorkian’s Writing Beyond Prophecy, and Shari Goldberg’s Quiet Testimony all consider how religious discourse provides both subject matter for nineteenth-century novels and also sources for emulation and competition. In each of these fine studies, the authors also attend to the ways in which nineteenth-century American novels interrogate discourse itself, reflecting self-consciously on the meaning of speaking and writing in religious and fictive contexts alike. The sermon and its novelistic representations and analogues loom particularly large for Dawn Coleman and Martin Kevorkian, while Shari Goldberg relies on the related, though not entirely coterminous, category of testimony to structure her study. The novel and the sermon can function as rivals for preeminence in nineteenth-century American literary culture, as Dawn Coleman points out in her illuminating study Preaching and the Rise of the American Novel, but as she goes on to suggest, they also interpenetrate each other and inform each other on multiple artistic and conceptual levels. The sermon, as Coleman points out, had a great deal more cultural authority for [End Page 116] many Americans than did the novel, and indeed, Coleman provides a useful corrective for our present tendency to assume that the mid-nineteenth century is simply the era of the novel’s triumph. Coleman deals deftly with the central challenge that she identifies in writing about preaching: how to capture the particulars of a performance that necessarily involves both communal context and the personal charisma and even physicality of the preacher. While acknowledging that much of the experience of hearing a nineteenth-century sermon is inaccessible to us, Coleman makes extensive use of manuals for the preparation and presentation of sermons to show the affective responses that preachers strove to cultivate and the methods that they used to stimulate these responses. Coleman shows that the ethos of the preacher was central to the authority of the sermon, and that increasingly during the nineteenth century, preachers depended on a relationship with their audience to shape their sermons, with ministers ranging from Henry Ware, Jr., to Charles G. Finney arguing for an extemporaneous mode of address that would allow the preacher to play off the cues of a congregation rather than remaining tethered to a manuscript. After discussing the structure and significance of the nineteenth-century sermon, Coleman brings together a diverse cast of characters to illustrate the cultural struggle between novelists and preachers in the nineteenth century: George Lippard, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and William Wells Brown. Coleman shows how the novel competes with the sermon for cultural authority and addresses various aspects of the experience of lived religion in the nineteenth-century United States. The working class radical George Lippard is the least well-known of the figures Coleman discusses, and she ably extends the case that has been made for Lippard’s place in the nineteenth-century American canon by David S. Reynolds, Shelley Streeby, and Samuel Otter, among others. Lippard frequently parodies and critiques preachers and preaching, but as Coleman acutely suggests, his voice in The Quaker City: Or the Monks of Monk Hall (1845) and other novels is also shaped by the forms of sermonic discourse. Lippard thus appears as both a critic of preaching and a preacher in his own right. Coleman suggests for several of the novelists she considers a seemingly unlikely sermonic source for...

The Personal Is the Historical: Souvenirs, Relics, and Living Exhibitions

The Personal Is the Historical: Souvenirs, Relics, and Living Exhibitions Steven Conn (bio) Teresa Barnett. Sacred Relics: Pieces of the Past in Nineteenth-Century America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. 264pp. Notes and index. $40.00. William L. Bird, Jr. Souvenir Nation: Relics, Keepsakes, and Curios from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of American History in association with Princeton Architectural Press, New York, 2013. 176pp. Illustrations, notes, and credits. $24.95. William S. Walker. A Living Exhibition: The Smithsonian and the Transformation of the Universal Museum. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2013. 304pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $80.00 (cloth); $27.95 (paper). If years of watching “Antiques Roadshow” has taught us anything, it is that one person’s garage-sale junk is another person’s treasure—worth somewhere in the five figures. We Americans like to collect stuff, and whole industries have blossomed promising to help us deal with it all. You can shop at the Storage Store or the Container Store to buy various kinds of storage (or, if you prefer, “container”) systems. If, however, you need to get the stuff out of your life but you can’t actually part with it, you can rent an off-site storage unit in one of those desolate places just off the exit ramp that resemble a cross between a cemetery and a trailer park. Still our stuff proliferates, and it threatens to bury us—like those freakish folks we enjoy watching on the A&E show “Hoarders.” We have always liked to collect stuff—for the better part of two centuries at any rate. What has changed over the years is the sheer volume of stuff there is to collect, its ready availability, and the expansion of stuff we now see as worthy of keeping in the first place. The impulse to collect, to accumulate, even to hoard has been with us for a long time. After all, those Victorian parlors looked even more cluttered than my living room—but of course they didn’t have the advantage of the Storage Store back then. [End Page 103] If it is true that one person’s tchotchke is another person’s heirloom, then it is also the case that one woman’s cluttered chaos is another’s carefully constructed system. Most people who collect do so according to some notion of system, taxonomy, or classification—however obscure it might be to the rest of us. Years ago, the art historian George Kubler observed that before we can make meaning out of things, we must have form; that we need to create some sort of organizational framework in order to understand the world around us. “We can grasp the universe,” Kubler wrote, “only by simplifying it with ideas of identity by classes, types, and categories.”1 Anthropologist Igor Kopytoff agreed when he wrote, “the human mind has an inherent tendency to impose order upon the chaos of its environment by classifying its contents, and without the classification knowledge of the world. . .would not be possible.”2 In different ways, each of the books under review here wrestles with this issue of categories: how they are defined, what goes into them, and what’s at stake in those parsings. William L. Bird Jr.’s Souvenir Nation and William S. Walker’s A Living Exhibition both examine aspects of the Smithsonian Institution, the nation’s single largest collection of stuff. Teresa Barnett’s Sacred Relics examines personal collections made by nineteenth-century Americans. By anyone’s best guess, the Smithsonian houses nearly 140 million separate objects. That is a staggering figure and one that frankly few of us can actually comprehend. Those 140 million range across every conceivable category of material thing: fine art, decorative arts, biological specimens, detritus from outer space, cores from the bottom of the oceans, pieces of technology, archaeological artifacts, ethnological objects, hand-made crafts and mass-produced consumer items, plus some that defy easy categorization altogether. Like a lock of Sir Walter Scott’s hair. That last is among the featured “souvenirs” in Bird’s charming book. Bird serves as a curator at the National Museum of...

Nature’s Noblemen: Transatlantic Masculinities and the Nineteenth-Century American West by Monica Rico (review)

Nature’s Noblemen: Transatlantic Masculinities and the Nineteenth-Century American West by Monica Rico (review)

Manifest destinations: cities and tourists in the nineteenth-century American West

Manifest destinations: cities and tourists in the nineteenth-century American West

The altar at home: sentimental literature and nineteenth-century American religion

The altar at home: sentimental literature and nineteenth-century American religion

Rachel McLean Sailor. Meaningful Places: Landscape Photographers in the Nineteenth-Century American West.

Rachel McLean Sailor. Meaningful Places: Landscape Photographers in the Nineteenth-Century American West.

Review of Dea Boster's African American Slavery and Disability

In African American Slavery and Disability: Bodies, Property, and Power in the Antebellum South, Dea Boster looks at how disability shaped the lived experience of slavery. Boster argues that while all slaves were objectified, disabled bondspeople were particularly oppressed by the social, economic, legal, and medical systems that perpetuated the institution of slavery in the nineteenth century American South.

Kelly Dennis. Review of "Meaningful Places: Landscape Photographers in the Nineteenth-Century American West" by Rachel Sailor.

Kelly Dennis. Review of "Meaningful Places: Landscape Photographers in the Nineteenth-Century American West" by Rachel Sailor.

“What Was It?”: The Immaterial Self and Nineteenth-Century American Panic

“What Was It?”: The Immaterial Self and Nineteenth-Century American Panic W.H. Burdine (bio) “What was it that so unnerved me in the contemplation of the House of Usher?” asks Edgar Allan Poe’s narrator in his 1839 “The Fall of the House of Usher.” The narrator finds himself inundated with sensations of “insufferable gloom… an utter depression… an iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart— an unredeemed dreariness of thought which no goading of the imagination could torture into aught of the sublime” and struggles to find a source for these feelings.1 At times, the feelings appear to come from the stones of the House, at other times from the objects in the house, and finally Roderick Usher seems to infect the narrator with his feelings. However, the narrator’s question emphasizes that the feelings result from his contemplation; as he thinks of the House, his nerve fails. Twenty years later, the narrator’s question would be echoed in Fitz-James O’Brien’s 1859 “What Was It?”2 In these stories the question is both a diegetic and metafictional discussion of terror that is directed by narrators toward the source of their feelings and directing the reader to contemplate the nature of writing. “What was it?” becomes a larger question of what is terrifying in a text. For both authors, their texts’ terror emerges from the persistence of the question’s enigma that the texts never satisfy. Poe asserts the bodily role of [End Page 441] Click for larger view View full resolution “Say, Rather, the Rending of Her Coffin.” Artist, Harry Clarke. From “The Fall of the House of Usher” in Tales of Mystery and Imagination by Edgar Allan Poe with Illustrations by Harry Clarke. (New York: Tudor, 1933), 139. [End Page 442] terror—a failure of narrator and reader to comprehend the terror. O’Brien, on the other hand, questions the reality and materiality of those bodies. “What Was It?” presents bodies as inherently spectral, things which can be investigated to no avail. Both stories appeared within two years of two major nineteenth-century American financial crises: the Panic of 1837 and the Panic of 1857. Previous criticism has linked Poe’s brand of gothic grotesque to economic instability. Jill Lepore’s “The Humbug: Edgar Allan Poe and the economy of horror” contextualizes Poe’s writing completely within what she refers to as “the pit and the pendulum of the antebellum economy.”3 Gavin Jones describes “The Fall of the House of Usher” as an explicit allegory of “an era when rapid social and economic collapse was becoming the norm.” In response to economic insecurity, Jones argues that Poe’s “literature of revulsion” presents an “aesthetics of social failure” that reveals “how modern social relations have always been defined by… uncertainty.” It is telling that both Poe and O’Brien wrote their horror stories during a period when the term “revulsion” connoted economic downturn before it would later be replaced by “depression.”4 Both Poe and O’Brien react to the economic crises of their times by offering literary revulsions of their own. Poe responds by offering the text as an imaginative space of immateriality, one which constitutes the relationship between the bodies of authors and readers. Fitz-James O’Brien, on the other hand, troubles the assumptions of the realities of bodies—authorial, textual, and readerly. Telling the story of an encounter with an invisible body, O’Brien suggests the text creates a contact zone that turns back upon the reader, revealing her own immateriality within capitalism. [End Page 443] “what was it?” Fitz-James O’Brien’s short story is frequently anthologized in collections of Victorian ghost or horror stories, but has largely escaped critical attention. While many of O’Brien’s works are unmemorable, he wrote a few fascinating short stories such as “What Was It?”, The Diamond Lens” (1858), and “The Pot of Tulips” (1855).5 O’Brien was wildly popular in his time and was part of a group of writers and artists in 1850-60s New York City called “The Bohemians.” Among their ranks were writers such as Walt Whitman, Thomas Bailey Aldrich, Henry Clapp, and John...

Gilbert Stuart and the Impact of Manic Depression by Dorinda Evans (review)

Reviewed by: Gilbert Stuart and the Impact of Manic Depression by Dorinda Evans Ellen G. Miles (bio) Gilbert Stuart and the Impact of Manic Depression Dorinda Evans Farnham, England: Ashgate, 2013 204 pp. Dorinda Evans is one of a small number of art historians (including this reviewer) who have recently written about Gilbert Stuart and his memorable portraits of the political and social leaders of the early years of the American Republic. Employing her expertise in late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American and British art, she has considered his work in differing contexts for more than forty years. In her book-length study, The Genius of Gilbert Stuart (1999), she demonstrated in detail his approach to portraiture, and also documented his interactions with his contemporaries, including patrons and other artists. In the last chapter of this book she first proposed that he suffered throughout his life from manic depression, or bipolarity. In this new book, she has marshaled evidence for her theory, which seeks to understand the unevenness of his work, including portraits left unfinished and compositions awkwardly realized, contrasted with exceptionally successful characterizations. This unevenness has resulted in major disagreements among art historians about the reliable visual characteristics of his technique on which to base attributions. Evans carefully bases her discussion on paintings that she has seen, in order to avoid problematic works. She concentrates particularly on eight paintings about which she had discussions with conservators and for which she could consult x-rays, some reproduced here. These close examinations [End Page 571] are presented within a broader study that draws heavily on a wide range of documentation. No one knows Stuart’s work better or has been as thorough in locating the many references to him, including comments found in unpublished letters and diaries as well as in contemporary newspaper articles or books. Evans’s description of his awareness of his condition conveys a view of the artist that leads the reader to admire and sympathize with him. The book is an outstanding accomplishment, focused and purposeful, carefully researched, and with telling use of the written sources. Evans bases her analysis of Stuart’s behavior and the varied manner of his paintings on known characteristics of bipolarity, frequently citing important medical sources on the condition and its effects: all with the stated goal of better understanding the paintings themselves. Her argument begins with “The Case for Bipolarity,” a chapter largely based on descriptions by contemporaries that successfully brings Stuart to life. It shows him to be irregular in his habits, “cyclical” (painting in the morning only, or in the spring and not the winter), and given to excuses about uncompleted paintings. When discussing his bipolarity, for example, she notes that he adopted “a few crutches,” including the use of life masks of a sitter’s face “so that he could work on the picture at any time” (18). She notes that contemporaries saw his work as uneven, unfinished, and cold in coloring. She wonders why he delayed in arranging sittings with George Washington, “with perhaps some self-doubt … waiting for the right mood swing” (19). She quotes many contemporary observations about his swings in mood, including two that appeared in William Dunlap’s early biography, published in 1834, only six years after his death. Stuart’s lifelong friend Benjamin Waterhouse described Stuart as never having an “evenness of spirits” because “with Stuart it was either high tide or low tide,” and Dunlap wrote that “Stuart’s passions and appetites were of a kind said to be uncontrollable” (9, 17). In the second chapter, “Marked Pictures,” Evans concentrates on individual paintings. She writes about his lifelong challenge with group portraits and full lengths, inconsistencies and awkward proportions in completing pictures, delays in arranging sittings, choice of colors ranging from pale or monochromatic to bright, and inconsistent advice to students about painting flesh. Among the paintings that she relates to his bipolarity are a very early work, Mrs. Christian Banister and Son, which she discusses using an x-ray detail; the painting of George Washington known as the “Vaughan” [End Page 572] portrait, long thought to be the first life portrait, again discussed with reference to an x-ray; three...

Thoreau’s ear

Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) was the only nineteenth-century American writer of the very first rank who paid prolonged and intense attention to sound-worlds, particularly non-human ones. As a naturalist, Thoreau’s fieldwork not only involved botany but also sound-collecting. Relying on his Journal and other written work, I show how Thoreau understood music as sound, paying particular attention to his writings on ambient sound and animal sound communication in acoustic ecological niches; showing how he understood sound announces presence and enables co-presence; and pointing to his development of a relational epistemology and alternative economy based in sound. His responses to the vibrations of the environment through prolonged and deep listening, more than 150 years ago, make him valuable for sound studies today.

Transatlantic Women: Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers and Great Britain

Transatlantic Women: Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers and Great Britain

The “monster” of Seymour Avenue: Internet crime news and Gothic reportage in the case of Ariel Castro

AbstractWhile American media reportage of heinous crimes has long drawn on Gothic iconography to secure readers, the contemporary digital news market has engendered a trend in crime reporting that transparently imparts the conventions of Victorian horror, and by extension the nineteenth-century American Gothic. Employing a semiotic content analysis of Internet news stories (

Blackface Abolition and the New Slave Narrative

Since the 1990s, survivors of forced labor have been authoring first-person narratives that consciously and unconsciously reiterate the tropes and conventions of the nineteenth-century American slave narrative. These “new slave narratives” typically conform to the generic tendencies of the traditional slave narratives and serve similar activist purposes. Some of the most popular of the narratives have taken a particular political turn in the post-9/11 context, however, as neoliberal political agendas and anti-Muslim sentiments come to dominate the form and content of many of the African narratives that have been produced. This paper identifies a “blackface abolitionist” trend, in which the first-person testimonies of formerly enslaved Africans is co-opted by some politically motivated white American abolitionists to play a black masquerade, in which they adorn themselves with the suffering of enslaved Africans to thinly veil the self-exonerating and self-defensive crusade politics that motivate their engagement in anti-slavery work.

Review: Experience and Experimental Writing: Literary Pragmatism from Emerson to the Jameses

Book Review| December 01 2014 Review: Experience and Experimental Writing: Literary Pragmatism from Emerson to the Jameses Paul Grimstad, Experience and Experimental Writing: Literary Pragmatism from Emerson to the Jameses. : Oxford University Press, 2013. Pp. xii + 176. $65. Kerry Larson Kerry Larson 1University of Michigan Kerry Larson is Professor of English at the University of Michigan. He is the author of Whitman’s Drama of Consensus (1988) and Imagining Equality in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (2008) and editor of The Cambridge Companion to Nineteenth-Century American Poetry (2011). Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Nineteenth-Century Literature (2014) 69 (3): 394–397. https://doi.org/10.1525/ncl.2014.69.3.394 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Kerry Larson; Review: Experience and Experimental Writing: Literary Pragmatism from Emerson to the Jameses. Nineteenth-Century Literature 1 December 2014; 69 (3): 394–397. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/ncl.2014.69.3.394 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentNineteenth-Century Literature Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2014 by The Regents of the University of California2014 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.