Philadelphia Stories : America's Literature of Race and Freedom

In Philadelphia Stories, Samuel Otter finds literary value, historical significance, and political urgency in a sequence of texts written in and about Philadelphia between the Constitution and the Civil War. Historians such as Gary B. Nash and Julie Winch have chronicled the distinctive social and political space of early national Philadelphia. Yet while individual writers such as Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Allan Poe, and George Lippard have been linked to Philadelphia, no sustained attempt has been made to understand these figures, and many others, as writing in a tradition tied to the city's history. The site of William Penn's'Holy Experiment'in religious toleration and representative government and of national Declaration and Constitution, near the border between slavery and freedom, Philadelphia was home to one of the largest and most influential'free'African American communities in the United States. The city was seen by residents and observers as the laboratory for a social experiment with international consequences. Philadelphia would be the stage on which racial character would be tested and a possible future for the United States after slavery would be played out. It would be the arena in which various residents would or would not demonstrate their capacities to participate in the nation's civic and political life. Otter argues that the Philadelphia'experiment'(the term used in the nineteenth-century) produced a largely unacknowledged literary tradition of peculiar forms and intensities, in which verbal performance and social behavior assumed the weight of race and nation. The site of William Penn's 'Holy Experiment' in religious toleration and representative government, Philadelphia was home to one of the largest and most influential 'free' African American communities in the United States. The city was seen as a laboratory for social experimentation, one with international consequences. While historians such as Gary B. Nash and Julie Winch have chronicled the distinctive social and political space of early national Philadelphia, no sustained attempt has been made to understand how writers such as Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Brockden Brown, George Lippard, and others were creating a distinctive literary tradition, one shaped by the city itself. Analyzing a sequence of texts written in and about Philadelphia between the Constitution and the Civil War, Otter shows how literary discourse intervened significantly in the period's intense debates about character, race, and nation. The book advances chronologically from the 1790s to the 1850s, and it is organized around the volatile issues the Philadelphia writing tradition responded to: contagion, riots, manners, and freedom. Throughout this exemplary work, Otter reveals how historical events produced a literature that wrestles with specific concerns: the city as specimen, the diagnosis and proper treatment for urban disorder, the effects of position on interpretation, the trials of character, the substance of action, the nature of human difference and similarity, and the vehemence of prejudice. Philadelphia Stories is a work that reveals (1) how the writers of Philadelphia defined the edge between freedom and slavery, altering the course of America's intellectual and national history, and (2) how the figure 'Philadelphia' stands for a place, a history, a tradition of the 'literary' that enriches and even clarifies the whole of American literary history

A historic and symbolic city on the border between slavery and freedom, antebellum Philadelphia was home to one of the largest and most influential "free" African American communities in the United States. The city was seen by residents and observers as the stage on which the possibilities of freedom would be tested and a post-slavery future would be played out for the nation. Philadelphia's charged setting produced a distinctive literary tradition that confronted issues of race, character, violence, and liberty. Verbal performance and social behavior assumed the weight of race and nation. The city's social experiments would have international consequences.

This account of Philadelphia's literary history from 1790 to1860 brings together writers familiar (Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Allan Poe, John Edgar Wideman), lesser known (Hugh Henry Brackenridge, George Lippard, Frank J. Webb), and obscure (Mathew Carey, Robert Montgomery Bird, William Whipper, Joseph Willson). It draws on a host of diverse, often discounted expressive forms, from fever accounts and metempsychic fiction to caricatures and book covers.

Samuel Otter's authoritative study considers the significance of geographical, social, and literary "place." It offers a model for thinking about the relationships between literature and history and among European-American and African-American writers. It challenges conventional narratives of American literary history. And finally, it establishes Philadelphia as fundamental to our understanding of not only the political but also the imaginative life of nineteenth-century America.

Mathew Carey, Absalom Jones, Richard Allen, and the color of fever Ministers and criminals: Richard Allen, John Joyce, and Peter Matthias Benjamin Rush's heroic interventions Mathew Carey's fugitive Philadelphians Charles Brockden Brown's experiments in character Hugh Henry Brackenridge, and the irrepressible teague Edward W. Clay's "Life in Philadelphia" "The rage for profiles": silhouettes at Peale's Museum Philadelphia metempsychosis in Robert Montgomery Bird's Sheppard Lee The peculiar position of our people William Whipper and debates in the black conventions Disfranchisement and appeal Joseph Willson's higher classes of colored society in Philadelphia "Doomed to destruction": the history of Pennsylvania hall The portraiture of the city of Philadelphia, and Henry James's American scene the mysteries of the city: George Lippard, Edgar Allan Poe The fiction of riot: George Lippard, John Beauchamp Jones The condition of the free people of color The struggle over "Philadelphia": Mary Howard Schoolcraft, Sara Josepha Hale, Martin Robison Delany, William Whipper and James McCune Smith Whipper Frank J. Webb's the garies and their friends "A rather curious protest" Still life in Georgia History and farce Parlor and riot Philadelphia vanitas The social experiment in Herman Melville's Benito Cereno. Samuel Otter's authoritative study considers the significance of geographical, social, and literary "place." It offers a model for thinking about the relationships between literature and history and among European American and African American writers. It challenges conventional narratives of American literary history. And finally, it establishes Philadelphia as fundamental to our understanding of not only the political but also the imaginative life of nineteenth-century America