Over the past thirty years, the expansion of the literary canon has enriched Americanist critics’ sense for what sorts of stories make up the nineteenth-century novel. Our basic narrative about what happens to the novel over the span of the century, however, has remained staunchly in place: the novel rises. The terms of the rise vary, but the model abides, carried over from Cathy Davidson’s Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America (1986) into Philip F. Gura’s Truth’s Ragged Edge: The Rise of the American Novel (2013). This dissertation contends that it is time to replace the rise model. Thinking the nineteenth-century novel through its system of subgenres, it presents a broad and conceptually coherent account of the novel’s midcentury flourishing.

Around 1840, the novel triumphs—over readers and writers alike. If the novel rises, it squashes too; new novels “drop down by millions all over our land,” quips one critic, overwhelmed in 1847. At this moment, the novel must learn do for a mass audience what a master-reader no longer can: contextualize and conceptualize the ways its instances plummet, jostle, clump, and spread. Major subgenres of the novel develop themselves, I show, by developing different techniques for attaching their instances to one another and detaching them from instances of other subgenres. Sentimental novels prosper by the conventionalisms of plot and character they share. The bildungsroman, a story of individual development, strives instead to appear in a condensed, paradigmatic instance. Gothic novels scatter into sub-subgenres (like city mysteries or detective fiction), improvised clusters that momentarily absorb and redirect the impulse to scatter further. And the novels of American literary realism emphasize the autonomy of each work, its simple difference from other stories in a world full of other stories. A system of love proclivities or erotic shapes subtends these subgenres. The place, I claim, where the generic dynamics that define nineteenth-century novels can be observed most clearly and creatively is the love plot.

The study and characterization of the literary uses of non-standard AmericanEnglish writing systems was once a topic of research central to the study of American literature. Speech as Writing: Literary Dialect Orthography in the United States 1790-1930 argues that the emergence of new computational tools and theoretical insights enables a return to the general study of at least one common component of literary dialect – non-standard orthography. The use of non-standard orthographic systems in crafting dialect literature differs from the use of non-standard syntax or vocabulary in that it presents a full system of meaning independent from the encoding facet of orthography typically explored by linguistics or cognitive science. "Speech as Writing" employs these insights alongside a computational methodology drawn from corpus linguistics and information theory to explore how this novel understanding of orthography can contribute to novel understandings of nineteenth and early twentieth-century United States literature.

Theories of Reading from Nineteenth-Century American Fiction proceeds from the claim that when we read nineteenth-century American literature, we read about reading. From characters depicted with books in hand, to citations of newspapers within novels, nineteenth-century texts teem with depictions of overt and implied reading. While diverse scenes of reading are everywhere in nineteenth-century American literature, the stories Americanist critics tell about reading in this period are surprisingly limited. Though literature does not depict reading solely (or even usually) as a means to cultivate subjectivity, Americanist criticism seems unable to resist framing all modes of reading as a mechanism for cultivating liberal subjects and spurring participation in the public sphere. The question that drives Theories of Reading from Nineteenth-Century American Fiction is: what else could we say about reading if we suspended our belief that to read is always to participate in an enlightenment project?

This dissertation mines scenes of reading from five key texts to articulate multiple and competing theories of reading that are not bound up with discussions of liberal subject formation or debates about the public sphere. I define a “scene of reading” as a tableau in which there is a prior, potential, or present relationship between a witness and a text. This capacious definition collects an array of representations that imply, reference, or contain the possibility for reading under a single heading. Across four chapters and an epilogue, I explicate theories of reading as an activity that affects one’s perception of the world in The Sketch-Book (1820); registers in the feeling body in Wieland (1798); intervenes in social relations in Hope Leslie (1827); is irreducibly material and ideologically changeable in Clotel (1853); and proves the limits of our ability to textualize bodies of knowledge in Moby-Dick (1851). I examine interpolated letters, reprinted poems, moments of newspaper sharing, debates about gift books, and other scenes from fiction in order to multiply our descriptions for the uses of reading.

My dissertation argues that a symbiotic relationship between fiction and the occult existed in nineteenth century America. American authors reproduced occult ideas culled from the ancient systems of Hermeticism and Neoplatonism in their texts, and these fictions in turn inspired speculative traditions in America. "Occult Americans: Invisible Culture and the Literary Imagination" also provides a connecting link between ancient, magical ideas about the cosmos that were brought to America by its first colonists, and the later nineteenth century occult resurgence. Occult ideas did not go out of existence when Enlightenment dawned in America, but only shifted their terrain, and my dissertation sketches these new loci of occultism in antebellum America.

In my first chapter, "The Triumph of Unreason: Charles Brockden Brown's Occult Moment," I examine the discourse of revelation as it was presented by several eighteenth century occult groups. This chapter isolates the religious threat implicit in the "Illuminati Panic" of the 1790s, and argues that Brown explored the occult claims of secret fraternities in his unfinished novella, Carwin, and in his novel, Ormond (1799).

My second chapter, "Discursive Failure and Imaginative Genesis: Occult Narration in the Corpus of Edgar Allan Poe," performs a close reading of Poe's 1848 cosmology, Eureka, the writer's earnest attempt to prove the coequality of matter and spirit and man's innate divinity. Poe's novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838), is a more successful realization of Hermetic ideas in its narrative form; unlike Eureka, Pym embeds the central Hermetic tropes of revelation, secrecy, and initiation in its ambiguous ending, symbolic language, and fantastic imagery.

My third chapter, "Masonry, Anti-Masonry, and the Brotherhood of the Union: George Lippard's Fraternal Dialectic," recounts the history of Freemasonry and Rosicrucianism in early America. Lippard's 1848 novel, Paul Ardenheim, stages the occult anointing of George Washington, and many of the novel's Rosicrucian vignettes appear as sacred books in the order Lippard founded, the Brotherhood of the Union. This occult context also provides fresh insight into Lippard's most popular novel, The Quaker City (1845), which dramatizes the antebellum discourse of Anti-Masonry in the corrupt "Monks of Monk Hall."

“The Imperfect Form: Literary Fragments and Politics in the Early Republic” examines a style of writing that grew in popularity in America from the 1770s through the middle of the nineteenth century—the fragment. In the burgeoning literary culture of the early American republic, authors commonly titled essays, poems, articles, and portions of novels “fragments” to create an unfinished aesthetic. Early republican reading audiences regularly encountered literary fragments in the corners of periodicals, in newspaper columns, in the pages of novels, and scattered throughout verse collections.

By and large, literary fragments exemplify two trends: the political, in the late eighteenth century, and the aesthetic, in the early nineteenth century. In the first half of my project, I examine how writers in the late eighteenth century consistently associated fragments with marginalized individuals. Material texts like a fragment of a letter, the shred of a diary page, or an illegible pamphlet provided resonant symbols for the fractured subjectivities of veterans, prostitutes, slaves, free blacks, the disabled, and other outcasts. The fragment form presents a way of accessing identities that are otherwise relatively unavailable, and authors like Samuel Jackson Pratt, Mathew Carey, Susannah Rowson, and Hannah Webster Foster used fragmentary texts to reconstruct the political agency of marginal individuals in new, vitally significant ways.

However, during the turn of the century writers began to move away from the intensely political emphasis and toward a more aesthetic fragment (though this movement transpired unevenly). The second half of my project focuses on writers like Charles Brockden Brown, Washington Irving, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, who all explored the formal features of the fragment. According to the Oxford English Dictionary the first usage of “fragment” as a verb occurs in a line from John Keats’s poem Endymion in 1818. Influenced by British and German Romantics, early nineteenth-century American authors begin to think of the fragment more as a verb—something in motion or in process. Attending to the literary history of the fragment thus provides insight into the complex connections among politics, material form, and aesthetic tradition in the early years of American literary culture.

This dissertation examines nineteenth-century American literary writers’ critical engagements with and contributions to the production of geographical knowledge prior to the emergence of geography as a distinct modern discipline. Three writers who are now best known for their works of literature, Charles Brockden Brown, Margaret Fuller, and Emily Dickinson, each in their own way sought to redress problems of content and method that they identified in American geographical texts that proliferated in their milieux. In atlases, gazetteers, and geography textbooks, as well as in works of travel writing and nature essays, these writers found not just limited accounts of the country but also, more broadly, what they judged to be insufficient approaches to attaining, organizing, and communicating knowledge of the external world. Their varied writings—Brown’s periodical publications, Fuller’s travel writing, and Dickinson’s letters and poems—attest to and embody a rich repository of critical geographical discourse in nineteenth-century American letters that has been all but illegible to scholars of geography and literature alike. This dissertation highlights, and attempts to overcome, the structural differences between modern academic disciplines and nineteenth-century knowledge production that have made these writers’ engagements with geography—in the etymological sense of “earth-writing”—difficult to see, let alone appreciate and examine. In addition to expanding conceptions of the kind of work conducted by the individual writers discussed, this dissertation aims to model an approach to accessing, and assessing, the rich and varied economy of knowledge and knowledge production that they not only operated in but, through their acts of writing, brought into existence.

“Time’s Citizens” explores how American fiction shaped the public classification of sexual identification and civic membership in the U.S. in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. During a period when discourses of anti-progressive deviance were used for purposes of civic exclusion, “Time’s Citizens” argues that a subset of novelists deployed the qualities ascribed to queers in order to claim civic presence. As critics have shown, the U.S. novel in both its realist and its romantic incarnations has long depicted heterosexual life to underwrite civil belonging. The novels of my study—Henry James’s The Bostonians, William Dean Howells’s A Hazard of New Fortunes, Charles Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition, Willa Cather’s The Professor’s House, and Nella Larsen’s Passing and Quicksand—expose and critique this formation through their depiction of racial, sexual, and gendered exclusion. Even as the modern sexual binary was coming into articulation, these novels show queer modes of belonging that did not assimilate to the heteronormative model standardized in the law and assumed in most literature. “Time’s Citizens” claims that this strain of U.S. fiction reveals the limitations on rights for subjects who did not contribute to the narrative of national progress, which was associated with marriage, reproductive futurity, property ownership, and the regulated time of the industrial economy.

In dialogue with current trends in queer theory and historiography, “Time’s Citizens” suggests that the novel was uniquely positioned to register the political stakes of queer difference. Deploying the temporal deviance used to represent queer subjects and their relation to, antagonism toward, or erasure by the progressive, reproductive state, the novel was able to represent modes of civic presence that were becoming impossible under U.S. social and legal regimes. To explore the relation between politics and the novel, “Time’s Citizens” works at the intersection of legal studies, critical race theory, and the investigations of queer time to show how marginal figures of a variety of identities relate to the ongoing struggle for equal rights and representation. When taken together, the novels of this study question the presumption of normativity and view queerness as a mode of identification deeply tied to civic structures and local politics. Instead of carving a separate sphere for queer being, these texts sought relations to citizenship not predicated on conformity but able to accommodate more diverse modes of expression and identification.

My project examines the historical ideas of American identity that developed in early U.S. periodicals, the most popular form of print in the 18th- and 19th-century U.S. In periodicals, I show, American identity was often imagined as a category distinct from nationality or U.S. citizenship, and expressed a host of local and contingent meanings. I look beyond the book form to historicize U.S. writers’ ideas of the relationship between the American, the U.S. government, and the nation it purportedly represented.

What is black life-writing beyond the canon of the slave narrative? Matters of Life: Writing Lives in the Age of United States Slavery shows that on the margins of the slave narrative exists a plenitude of forms, practices, and concepts that invite reconsideration of the premises that continue to structure understandings of the field of life-writing in the age of slavery. These premises include, but are not limited to, the following claims: that emulative lives begin in enslavement and end in freedom, that sophisticated narrative is the domain of autobiography, that authenticity and truth are the goals of life-writing. Matters of Life explores how biographical novellas, collective biographies, and scrapbooks offer alternative accounts about the possible life stories and forms that such stories take during the age of slavery in the United States.