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At the end of his long life, Samuel Clemens felt driven to write a truthful account of what he regarded as the flaws in his character and the errors of his ways. His attempt to tell the unvarnished truth about himself is preserved in nearly 250 autobiographical dictations. In order to encourage complete veracity, he decided from the outset that these would be published only posthumously. Nevertheless, Clemens's autobiography is singularly unrevealing. This book argues that, by contrast, it is in his fiction that Clemens most fully — if often inadvertently — reveals himself. He was, he confessed, like a cat who labours in vain to bury the waste that he has left behind. The author argues that he wrote out of an enduring need to come to terms with his remembered experiences — not to memorialize the past, but to transform it. By all accounts — including his own — Clemens's special curse was guilt. He was unable to forgive himself for the deaths of those closest to him — from his siblings' death in childhood to the deaths of his own children. Nor could he reconcile himself to his role in the Civil War, his part in the duel that prompted his departure from Virginia City in 1864, and — worst of all — his sense of moral complicity in the crimes of slavery. Tracing the theme of bad faith in all of Clemens's major writing, but with special attention to the late work, the author sheds new light on a tormented moral life. His book challenges conventional assumptions about the humorist's personality and creativity, directing attention to what William Dean Howells describes as the depths of a nature whose tragical seriousness broke in the laughter which the unwise took for the whole of him.

What does it mean to own something? How does a thing become mine? Liberal philosophy since John Locke has championed the salutary effects of private property but has avoided the more difficult questions of property’s ontology. This book argues that antebellum American literature is obsessed with precisely these questions of ownership. Reading slave narratives, gothic romances, city-mystery novels, and a range of other property narratives, this book unearths a wide-ranging literary effort to understand the nature of ownership, the phenomenology of possession. In authors as diverse as Charles Brockden Brown, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Elizabeth Stoddard, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, and William Gilmore Simms, this book reveals an ontological—and embodied—account of property. In these antebellum texts, ownership is not an abstract legal form but a lived relation, a dynamic of embodiment emerging within specific cultural spaces—a disputed frontier, a city agitated by class conflict—each of which stamps that embodiment with a particular place and time. Employing an innovative phenomenological approach that combines careful historical work with an array of European philosophies, this book challenges existing accounts that map property practice along a trajectory of abstraction and virtualization. It also reorients recent Americanist work in emotion and affect by detailing a broader phenomenology of ownership, one extending beyond emotion to such sensory experiences as touch, taste, and vision. This productive blend of phenomenology and history uncovers deep-seated anxieties—and enthusiasms—about property across antebellum culture.

“What is the hangman but a servant of law? And what is that law but an expression of public opinion? And if public opinion be brutal and thou a component part thereof, art thou not the hangman's accomplice?” Writing in 1842, Lydia Maria Child articulates a crisis in the relationship of democracy to sovereign power that continues to occupy political theory today. Is sovereignty, with its reliance on singular and exceptional power, fundamentally inimical to democracy? Or might a more fully realized democracy distribute, share, and popularize sovereignty, thus blunting its exceptional character and its basic violence? This book looks to an earlier moment in the history of American democracy's vexed interpretation of sovereignty to argue that such questions about the popularization of sovereign power shaped debates about political belonging and public life in the antebellum United States. In an emergent democracy that was also an expansionist slave society, the author argues, the problems that sovereignty posed were less concerned with a singular and exceptional power lodged in the state than with a power over life and death that involved all Americans intimately. Drawing on Alexis de Tocqueville's analysis of the sovereignty of the people in Democracy in America, along with work by Gustave de Beaumont, Lydia Maria Child, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville, this book tracks the crises of sovereign power as it migrates out of the state to become a constitutive feature of the public sphere.

Quiet Testimony develops a theory of what it means to bear witness that emerges from the nineteenth century while responding to urgent contemporary questions. It argues that four key figures in American literature—Ralph Waldo Emerson, Frederick Douglass, Herman Melville, and Henry James—resist restricting testimony to voiced pronouncements. Instead, they attend to impressions conveyed by inanimate or otherwise speechless entities, such as a vegetable, a silenced slave, a breeze, and a corpse. In imagining how such entities could be conceived as bearing witness, each writer rethinks, and opens up, what qualifies as testimony. The book’s chapters put particular pressure on the assumptions that testimony represents past events, that it relies on the identity of its speaker, that it must be voiced, and that it belongs exclusively to the living. The premise of a “quiet testimony” emerges from the intellectual investments of the nineteenth-century, and the book attends to how mystical inclinations, legal debates, and political suppressions provided various contexts for thinking differently about how testimony works. At the same time, the book positions itself as responsive to recent theoretical writings on testimony, especially those published in the wake of the Shoah and more recent human rights disasters. Quiet Testimony ultimately suggests that Emerson, Douglass, Melville, and James may help us to more acutely approach testimony in the twenty-first century.

The Sentimental Touch investigates emotion in American literature during a period in which American culture became more and more impersonal. Between 1850 and 1940, with the rise of managerial capitalism in the United States, the most powerful businesses were no longer family-owned, but became sprawling organizations controlled by complex bureaucracies. Rapid changes in the economy transformed U.S. culture: capitalism emerged as a massive ruling order whose hierarchical structures outlasted any human, and Americans became increasingly atomized and alienated. Sentimental literature—work written specifically to convey and inspire deep feeling—does not seem to fit with a swiftly bureaucratizing society. Yet sentimental language persisted in American literature, even as a culture of managed systems threatened to obscure the power of individual affect. The Sentimental Touch explores the strange, enduring power of sentimental language by focusing on one of the hallmark expressions of the sentimental novel: the human touch whose meaning surpasses all language. When characters make their deepest feelings visible through silent bodily contact, characters and readers alike imagine they are experiencing unmediated emotion. Analyzing novels by Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mark Twain, Sherwood Anderson, and Nathanael West, this book demonstrates that sentimental tropes change but remain powerful, even in works by authors who self-consciously write against the sentimental tradition. Sentimental language has an afterlife, enduring in American literature long after authors and critics declared it dead, insisting that human feeling can resist a mechanizing culture, and embodying, paradoxically, the way that literary conventions themselves become mechanical and systematic.