Crossings in Nineteenth-Century American Culture : Junctures of Time, Space, Self and Politics

## A state of the field essay collection that offers new models for analysing time, space, self and politics in nineteenth-century American culture * Provides new terminology for considering nineteenth-century selfhood * Maps hitherto unexplored terrains, real and imaginary, in nineteenth-century America * Defines alternative and often surprising political systems that framed nineteenth-century American literature Across four parts of exploratory, creative and speculative essays, this book provides provocative frameworks and readings of canonical and non-canonical literature. The essays cover off-the-map places, warped historical chronologies, excessive selves, unlikely meetings and systemic incommensurability. Collectively they define original methods, categories and terrains for the study of the American cultural past. Altogether, this collection interrogates some of the most dominant critical moves of the past two decades and proposes alternative ways of working and thinking with the American nineteenth century. Contents 5 Figures 7 Contributors 8 Introduction 13 Part I. Elsewheres 31 1 Material/Immaterial: Frederick Douglass and the ‘Moral Chemistry of the Universe’, 1855 31 2 Earth/Atmosphere: The Leonid Meteor Shower, 1833 41 3 Body/Spirit: Walt Whitman’s Hicksite Quaker Poetics, 1855 53 Part II. Excess Identities 71 4 Latinx/Confederate: Loreta Janeta Velazquez as a Cross-Dressing Soldier, 1861 71 5 Philippines/United States: David Fagen Defects to the Filipino Army, 1899 83 6 White/Not-White: Robert Montgomery Bird’s Racial Transformations, 1839 100 7 Ecology/Radica l Politics: Thoreau’s Science of Civil Disobedience, 1849 113 Part III. Chance Encounters 135 8 Mexico/Britain: A History of Julia Pastrana’s Teeth, 1860–2013 135 9 Matanzas, Cuba/Keswick, England: Maria Gowen Brooks Visits Robert Southey, 1831 158 10 England/New England: A British Quaker and a Fugitive from Slavery Encounter Each Other on a Train, 1850 170 Part IV. Impossible Systems 189 11 Slave Labour/Wage Labour: Reading Bartleby’s Refusals, 1850 189 12 Antiquity/Modernity: An Issue of Puck Magazine, 1889 207 13 Democracy/State: James Fenimore Cooper on the Frontier, 1826/1757 218 14 Ulster, 1785/Pennsylvania, 1817/ Ulster, 1845: James McHenry’s Palimpsest of Anglo Settler Colonialism 234 Index 258