1.Transatlantic Abridgment and the Unstable conomics of Robinson Crusoe. Emily Gowen Abstract -- This article examines the circulation and reception of cheap nineteenth-century American abridgments of Robinson Crusoe (1719). This essay shows that the American canonization of Daniel Defoe's narrative was a function of commercial printing and the democratic reading practices it enabled, particularly where poor and working-class readers were concerned. Robinson Crusoe's circulation among economically marginalized audiences becomes especially important when we consider the frequency with which issues of upward mobility and wealth acquisition are foregrounded in American abridgments and the interpretive instability such invocations evince. The variety of ways in which Robinson Crusoe abridgments engage with or disavow money suggests that Crusoe's gold was among the most contested symbols in the antebellum literary marketplace. Keywords Daniel Defoe, print culture, chapbooks, Robinsonades, economic history.--2.Cedar Hill: Frederick Douglass's Literary Landscape and the Racial Construction of Nature. Scott Hess Abstract -- This essay explores the overlooked significance of Cedar Hill, the landscaped estate Frederick Douglass bought in 1877 near Washington, DC, both as a literary landscape and as a form of participation in the nineteenth-century elite culture of nature. Literary landscapes, associated with specific authors and their genius, emerged during the nineteenth century as important sites of memory and focal points for new practices of literary interpretation, tourism, and pilgrimage. The essay demonstrates Douglass's self-conscious cultivation of Cedar Hill as a literary landscape that supported his claims for elite cultural status and full democratic citizenship. Cedar Hill allowed Douglass to claim both legal and symbolic possession over the landscape, establishing his connection with nature in ways that rivaled southern agrarian plantations and responded to his and other African Americans' dispossession from the land through slavery. Cedar Hill was memorialized after Douglass's death as a powerful site of African American identity, but its racial associations disqualified it as nature in the dominant white cultural imagination. Exploring Cedar Hill's lost legacy as a literary landscape sheds new light both on Douglass's identity and on the wider intersection of race, landscape, and nature in nineteenth-century and contemporary America. Keywords Frederick Douglass, Cedar Hill, literary landscapes, genius, nature.--3. Power of Body / Power of Mind: Arts and Crafts, New Thought, and Popular Women's Literature at the Fin de Siecle. Arielle Zibrak Abstract -- The article describes the impact of two popular fin de siécle philosophical movements - Arts and Crafts and New Thought-on both well-known authors like Frank Norris and Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the lesser-known writers it reads more closely: Ella Wheeler Wilcox and Madeline Yale Wynne. Although their values were antithetical, Arts and Crafts and New Thought shared Striking similarities in the ways they yoked consumption habits to personal well-being and used fiction to understand and endorse popular secular philosophies. These women-led movements shaped enduring national ideologies and the literature of their period, which tends to either synthesize the beliefs of both movements or represent one as patently superior to the other through satire or protest. The recovery of the history of these movements and their contribution to American literature not only retraces a lost genealogy of popular ideas that have shaped our culture, but also demonstrates the centrality of female thinkers and writers to the development of our present-day Notions about how to transcend the grinding forces of consumer capitalism in everyday life. Keywords secularism, consumerism, feminism, spiritualism, material culture .--4.Health Care Fictions: alpern he Business of Medicine and Modern US Literature. Ira Halpern Abstract -- The literary and cultural dimensions of the longstanding US political debate over public versus private health care have been critically underexplored. How did earty twentieth-century US writers portray the business of medical care within a stratified US economy? In Robert Herfick's The Healer (1911), Wallace Thurman and A. L. Furman's The Inteme (1932), and FrankG@. Slaughter's That None Should Die (1941), the problems of inequality, profit, and corruption plague the practice of professional medicine. The writers of these novels do not, for the most part, blame the trouble with care on individual nurses, doctors, or other medical staff. Instead of exposing the power of individual medical practitioners to exploit bodies, these novets call attention to the power of capitalism and inequality to distort and derange the mission of medicine. Yet, the political critiques offered by health care fictions are foreclosed by anxieties about coliective reform and government intervention in health care. So, this article asks why some of the most sustained literary treatments of capitalist medicine in US literature ultimately retreat from the structural critiques that they themselves raise. Keywords economy, hospital, inequity, sentimentality, realism.--5. Muriel Rukeyser "among Wars Feminist Internationalism in the Second Wave. Sam Huber. Abstract -- In her poems of the 1960s and 1970s, Muriel Rukeyser developed feminist internationalist alternatives to both masculinist antiwar politics and isolationist currents of women's liberation. At the same time that the nascent women's liberation movement appeared to turn inward to a domestic scene of women's oppression, feminist internationalists politicized personal life by confronting the entanglement of home, family, and the frontlines of a distant war in Vietnam. Key poems from Rukeyser's 1968 collection The Speed of Darkness were excerpted widely and embraced as authorizing exemplars of a new feminist poetry that aimed to express hidden truths of women's lives. But considered in the context of the original volume and alongside the writings of other feminist internationalists, these poems evince a different aim: rather than exhuming and conveying intimate experience, Rukeyser renders it permeable. Her poems of the late 1960s conjure an internationalist atmosphere in which to immerse their readers. Rukeyser's feminist internationalism requires us to more radically reconceive second-wave feminism as an intellectual and cultural terrain always in contact with a range of movements, sites, and subjects, irreducible even in its earliest years to the fractious organizational landscape of women's liberation. Keywords Muriel Rukeyser, feminism, internationalism, poetry, Vietnam War.--6. Democratic Aesthetics: Scenes of Political Violence and Anxiety in Nari Ward and Ocean Vuong. Matthew Scully Abstract -- By attending to art and writing that interrogates US citizenship and state violence, these essay foregrounds the structural antagonism between democracy as an instituted form of rule, which depends on in egalitarian hierarchies, and democracy's egalitarian drive. It argues that the realization of democracy as a form of governance (consensus democracy) occurs by subsbtuting the rule of a part for the whole, which violently forces democracy's constitutive figures to conform to and negotiate its organizing logics. Nari Ward's We the People (2011) allegorizes this inherent tension in democracy as one between synecdoche and metonymy. The article then theorizes a new form of democratic politics through an engagement with Jacques Ranciére before turning to Ocean Vuong's "Notebook Fragments" (2016) and "Self-Portrait as Ext Wounds" (2016) as articulations of a democratic aesthetics constituted by figures-includ'ng metonymy, irony, and catachresis-that interrupt the substitutions of synecdoche. Vueng's poetry foregrounds the violence enacted by state fantasies and insists on the democratic equality disavowed by consensus democracy. Together, Ward and Vuong locate the political force of aesthetics not in reassuring visions of inclusion but in operations that disturb and resist any form of hierarchy. Keywords democracy, aesthetics, citizenship, migration, politics.