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1.The Character Sketch, the Aesthetics of Representativeness, and Rip Van Winkle's Electoral Double Vision. Leila Mansouri Abstract --This essay examines how a literary genre called the character sketch shaped the ways Americans came to understand electoral representation as representative. Now little known but central to eighteenth and early-nineteenth-century literary culture in the US and Britain, character sketches and a related aesthetic discourse about how to distinguish "well-drawn characters" from caricature helped to naturalize the notion that meaningful, legitimate representation should be grounded in clearly delineated categories and distinctions that were true to the "Laws of Nature and Nature's God." However, this aesthetic and political framework intersected uneasily with the early nineteenth century's racially and economically diverse electoral public sphere. This public sphere was rife with fear that electoral "combinations" would so badly misrepresent the electorate that the United States would be functionally returned to tyranny. And these abstract fears often became entangled with the embodied discomfort genteel white men like Washington Irving experienced when "beer-barrier" politics brought them into contact with fellow voters whom they considered themselves naturally socially or racially distinct from. As a result, this paper shows, writing for and about early US elections-including Washington Irving's "Rip Van Winkle" (1819), whose electoral plot is often overlooked-was imbued with a disconcerting sense of double vision. Only by recovering that double vision's embodied and racialized electoral context can critics fully grapple with the aesthetic and political legacy of American literature's uneasy foundations. Keywords election, representation, aesthetics, race, politics.--2. Genres of Valuation: Marginalist Economics and American Literary Realism. Henry B. Wonham. Abstract -- This essay argues that late nineteenth-century American fiction, as exemplified by William Dean Howells's The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885) and Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie (1900), is entangled in the period's embrace of a new understanding of economic conditions, one premised on the significance of consumer data as the raw material of economic interpretation and fixated on mathematical analysis as a source of knowledge about value. Marginalism in economic theory and realism in American literary practice were contemporaneous efforts to mediate value at a moment of decisive transition in America, as a model of commodity-centered competitive capitalism yielded to the regime of corporate finance. The young academic economists of the period and their literary counterparts explained the economic landscape in much the same way and to many of the same ends. Both began with the daunting question of how to reimagine value in a world characterized by fictitious goods and increasingly abstract financial instruments, a world in which the labor theory of value seemed hopelessly outdated. Both responded to this challenge by proposing novel intellectual procedures for making values appear stable again by focusing on the subjective experiences of consumers. Finally, both marginalists and realists sought to provide a quasi-scientific bedrock for fixing values in consumer society not only by appealing nostalgically to an economy of actual goods and honest work but more importantly by accommodating readers, policy makers, and stakeholders of all kinds to the new realities of finance capitalism. Keywords value, neoclassical economics, consumer society, equilibrium, rational consumption.--3.The Unacknowledged War: Dunbar's History of White Revisionism. T. Austin Graham Abstract -- "The Unacknowledged War' is an inquiry into the phenomenon of Civil War revisionism, focusing on the tendency of white Americans to deny, against all available evidence, that the "war between the states" was waged over slavery. In doing so, the essay turns to Paul Laurence Dunbar's grievously understudied 1901 novel The Fanatics, a historical fiction of the war years that focuses on the white North and argues that the Unionists who battled the Confederacy did so only because they wrongly believed that the war's purpose had nothing to do with enslaved Black Americans. The essay also shows how Dunbar's novel contributes to several fields of contemporary intellectual interest, among them Civil War studies, Afro pessimist thought, and a cross-disciplinary investigation of negative epistemologies known as "ignorance studies." Ultimately, the essay concludes that Civil War revisionism has yet to show signs of ebbing in American historical consciousness and that ignorance-oriented novels like Dunbar's are indispensable partners for approaching this persistent problem. Keywords Civil War, critical race studies, African American literature, slavery, historical fiction.--4.The Rise of the Conspi picuously Young Novelist. Michael Maguire Abstract This essay illuminates the history of what David Foster Wallace dubbed the "conspicuously young" novelist (CYN), drawing on a series of brief case studies (F. Scott Fitzgerald, Raymond Radiguet, Carson McCullers, Truman Capote, Sylvia Plath, and James Baldwin) that demonstrate how certain CYNs were marketed and represented in advertising and journalistic discourse. In the process, it traces the construction of a number of ostensibly meritocratic but in practice highly inequitable-institutions that functioned to identify, sponsor, and promote young writers. Finally, this essay examines the pervasive critical rhetoric of "promise," which offers the key to understanding the dynamic of hype and disappointment immanent to each "younger generation" of CY writers. Keywords institutions, publishing, twentieth century.--5. Unsentimental Historicizing: The Neo-Slave Narrative Tradition and the Refusal of Feeling. Gabriella Friedman Abstract -- Rooted partially in the US sentimental tradition, neo-slave narratives often feature lyrical language, emphasize the emotional experience of enslaved characters, and evoke the reader's sympathy and empathy. Highlighting the use of sentimental conventions in neo-slave narratives including Alex Haley's Roots (1976), Octavia E. Butler's Kindred (1979), Sherley Anne Willams's Dessa Rose (1986), Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987), Lawrence Hill's The Book of Negroes (2007), and M. NourbeSe Philip's Zong! (2008), this essay explores the tension between sentimentality and the radical political goals of neo-slave narratives. This essay analyzes Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad (2016) as a neo-slave narrative that rejects rather than revises sentimental conventions. The novel's central conceit, a literal subterranean rail network, illustrates how anti-Blackness, settler colonialism, and racial capitalism interlock to materially and discursively enable the US nation-state and liberal citizenship; sentimental conventions facilitate processes of containment and capture that allow this infrastructure to function smoothly rather than disrupting it. In contrast, Underground foregrounds the prosaic over the lyrical, veils the interiority of its characters, and unsettles the reader's desire to fee! with or for the humanity of the enslaved. The novel models an alternative way of engaging slavery as an infrastructure, gesturing toward a mode of fugitive affiliation premised on acts of tangible care rather than affective identification or the possession of interiority. Keywords Black studies, sentimentality, fugitivity, Colson Whitehead, historical fiction. |
