This book examines the charged but mostly overlooked presence of the sensational Jew in antebellum literature. This stereotyped character appears primarily in the pulpy sensation fiction of popular writers like George Lippard, Ned Buntline, Emerson Bennett, and others. But this figure also plays an important role in the sometimes sensational work of canonical writers such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, and Walt Whitman. Whatever the medium, this character, always overdetermined, does consistent cultural work. This book contends that, as the figure who embodies money and capitalism in the antebellum imagination, the sensational Jew is the character who most fully represents a felt anxiety about the increasingly unstable nature of a range of social categories in the antebellum US, and the sense of loss and self-hatred so often lurking in the background of modern Gentile identity. Each chapter examines a different form of sensationalism (urban gothic; sentimental city mysteries; anti-Tom plantation narratives; etc.), and a different set of anxieties (threats to class status; collapsing regional identity; the uncertain status of Whiteness and other racial categories; etc.). Throughout, the sensational Jew acts both as a figure of proteophobia (fear of disorder and ambivalence), and as the figure who embodies in uncanny form a more fulfilling and socially coherent form of identity that predates the modern liberal selfhood of the post-Enlightenment world. The sensational Jew is therefore a revealing figure in antebellum culture, as well as an important antecedent to contemporary antisemitism in the US.

This book examines the charged but mostly overlooked presence of the sensational Jew in antebellum literature. This stereotyped character appears primarily in the pulpy sensation fiction of popular writers like George Lippard, Ned Buntline, Emerson Bennett, and others. But this figure also plays an important role in the sometimes sensational work of canonical writers such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, and Walt Whitman. Whatever the medium, this character, always overdetermined, does consistent cultural work. This book contends that, as the figure who embodies money and capitalism in the antebellum imagination, the sensational Jew is the character who most fully represents a felt anxiety about the increasingly unstable nature of a range of social categories in the antebellum US, and the sense of loss and self-hatred so often lurking in the background of modern Gentile identity. Each chapter examines a different form of sensationalism (urban gothic; sentimental city mysteries; anti-Tom plantation narratives; etc.), and a different set of anxieties (threats to class status; collapsing regional identity; the uncertain status of Whiteness and other racial categories; etc.). Throughout, the sensational Jew acts both as a figure of proteophobia (fear of disorder and ambivalence), and as the figure who embodies in uncanny form a more fulfilling and socially coherent form of identity that predates the modern liberal selfhood of the post-Enlightenment world. The sensational Jew is therefore a revealing figure in antebellum culture, as well as an important antecedent to contemporary antisemitism in the US.

The essays in American Literature in Transition, 1820-1860 offer a new approach to the antebellum era, one that frames the age not merely as the precursor to the Civil War but as indispensable for understanding present crises around such issues as race, imperialism, climate change, and the role of literature in American society. The essays make visible and usable the period's fecund imagined futures, futures that certainly included disunion but not only disunion. Tracing the historical contexts, literary forms and formats, global coordinates, and present reverberations of antebellum literature and culture, the essays in this volume build on existing scholarship while indicating exciting new avenues for research and teaching. Taken together, the essays in this volume make this era's literature relevant for a new generation of students and scholars.

What happens if we reconsider the literature of the Civil War North in light of the transformation of the federal state's power? While literary scholarship about the Civil War has more generally focused on the rise of wartime nationalism, Philip Gould looks particularly at how literary works engage the subjects of censorship, propaganda, and the reconfigured meanings of "loyalty" and "treason" at a time of political crisis. During the war the Lincoln Administration shut down opposition newspapers and curtailed free expression and civil liberties protected by the US Constitution. Lincoln also suspended the writ of habeas corpus to deal with political dissenters and try to control public opinion. Early in the war, he coined the phrase "war power" to describe the (presumed) powers to address this crisis; his policies became controversial throughout the conflict. War Power: Literature and the State in the Civil War North considers literary production in this "total war" that radically changed the federal government's (and its military's) relation to traditional norms and spaces of private, domestic, and social life. Each chapter focuses on a major writer in the Civil War North's engagement with questions of identity, affect, and affiliation: Could one love the Union as one loved home and family? What were the implications for literary expression in the midst of a political culture being reshaped by censorship and propaganda? The final two chapters address the role and plight of African Americans in the Civil War and its aftermath, focusing particularly on African American military service as the supposed means by which racially disenfranchised Americans might become citizens.

Stephen Schryer traces the careers of novelists, journalists, and literary critics who wrote for William F. Buckley, Jr.'s National Review and highlights these writers' enduring impact on movement conservatism.

Political Liberalism and the Rise of American Romanticism explores how American Romanticism developed in response to pervasive conflicts over democracy's moral dimensions in the early republic and antebellum eras. By recovering the long-under-examined tradition of political liberalism for literary studies, it traces how US writers reacted to ongoing moral and political conflict by engaging with liberal thinkers and ideas as they endeavored to understand how individuals beholden to a divergent array of moral convictions might nevertheless share a stable and just political world—the very dilemma at the core of political liberalism. This study demonstrates how those philosophical engagements sparked Romanticism's rise and eventual flourishing as US writers increasingly embraced Romantic literary modes emphasizing the imagination's capacity for creative synthesis and the role it plays in shoring up the habits of mind and feeling that are vital to a meaningful democratic culture. It offers revisionary readings of works by Charles Brockden Brown, Robert Montgomery Bird, James Fenimore Cooper, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Frederick Douglass, and Nathaniel Hawthorne to show how these Romantic writers were preoccupied with how individuals come to embrace their deepest convictions and what happens when they encounter others who see the world differently.

Peace in the US Republic of Letters, 1840-1900 explores the early peace movement as it captured the imagination of leading writers. The book charts the rise of the peace cause from its sources in the works of William Penn and John Woolman, through the founding of the first peace societies in 1815 and the mid-century peace congresses, to the postbellum movement's consequential emphasis on arbitration. The Civil War is the central axis for the book, with three chapters organized around readings of novels by James Fenimore Cooper, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Nathaniel Hawthorne spanning the period from 1840 to 1865. Cooper had personal connections to the movement and thought deeply about the issues it addressed. Literary interest in peace at times overlapped with abolitionism, as was true for Stowe. And, in the case of Hawthorne, attention to peace advocacy arose out of a mixture of skepticism regarding perfectionist impulses, a desire to explore the nature and limits of violence, and fear of civil conflict. The volume also explores fiction engaged with problems that arose in the aftermath of that war, including novels by Henry Adams and John Hay on political corruption and class conflict; works on the failures of Reconstruction by Albion Tourgée and Charles Chesnutt; and the varied treatments of Indigenous experience in Helen Hunt Jackson's Ramona and Simon Pokagon's Queen of the Woods. All of these writers focused on issues related to the cause of peace, expanding its thematic reach and anticipating key insights of twentieth-century peace scholars.

The 1850s United States witnessed a far-reaching political, social, and economic crisis. Symptomatic of this, a wide range of narrative fiction from sentimental novels to sensational drama identifies a foundational link between liberal institutions and performative utterances. Auctions, trials, marriages, and contracts, this fiction contends, all depend on the self-constituting authority of words and performances which anybody and everybody can appropriate and are always subject to misfiring. Rather than viewing this as a liberatory and egalitarian political force, however, writers from Herman Melville and James Fenimore Cooper to Captain Mayne Reid and E.D.E.N. Southworth insist that such naked authority must be supplemented. A broad swath of 1850s literature insists that this supplement ought to come from Christianity. Anticipating thinkers like Carl Schmitt and Giorgio Agamben, these works suggest that legitimate political authority depends upon its ability to represent Christian transcendence and account for revealed truth, something firmly outside of speech acts’ and performance’s purview. In so doing, this diverse body of fiction registers a desire to reconstitute political authority on transcendent and representable ground, augmenting institutional reliance on mere words and assuaging the contemporary crises of confidence and authority.

Klezmer is a continually evolving musical tradition that grows out of Eastern European Jewish culture, and its changes reflect Jews' interaction with other groups as well as their shifting relations to their own history. But what happens when, in the klezmer spirit, the performances that go into the making of Jewishness come into contact with those that build different forms of cultural identity? Jonathan Freedman argues that terms central to the Jewish experience in America, notions like "the immigrant," the "ethnic," and even the "model minority," have worked and continue to intertwine the Jewish-American with the experiences, histories, and imaginative productions of Latinos, Asians, African Americans, and gays and lesbians, among others. He traces these relationships in a number of arenas: the crossover between jazz and klezmer and its consequences in Philip Roth's The Human Stain; the relationship between Jewishness and queer identity in Tony Kushner's Angels in America; fictions concerning crypto-Jews in Cuba and the Mexican-American borderland; the connection between Jews and Christian apocalyptic narratives; stories of "new immigrants" by Bharathi Mukherjee, Gish Jen, Lan Samantha Chang, and Gary Shteyngart; and the revisionary relation of these authors to the classic Jewish American immigrant narratives of Henry Roth, Bernard Malamud, and Saul Bellow. By interrogating the fraught and multidimensional uses of Jews, Judaism, and Jewishness, Freedman deepens our understanding of ethnoracial complexities.

Paper Money Men: Commerce, Manhood, and the Sensational Public Sphere in Antebellum America by David Anthony outlines the emergence of a "sensational public sphere" in antebellum America. It argues that this new representational space reflected and helped shape the intricate relationship between commerce and masculine sensibility in a period of dramatic economic upheaval. Looking at a variety of sensational media--from penny press newspapers and pulpy dime novels to the work of well-known writers such as Irving, Hawthorne, and Melville--this book counters the common critical notion that the period's sensationalism addressed a primarily working-class audience. Instead, Paper Money Men shows how a wide variety of sensational media was in fact aimed principally at an emergent class of young professional men. "Paper money men" were caught in the transition from an older and more stable mercantilist economy to a panic-prone economic system centered on credit and speculation. And, Anthony argues, they found themselves reflected in the sensational public sphere, a fantasy space in which new models of professional manhood were repeatedly staged and negotiated. Compensatory in nature, these alternative models of manhood rejected fiscal security and property as markers of a stable selfhood, looking instead toward intangible factors such as emotion and race in an effort to forge a secure sense of manhood in an age of intense uncertainty.