The introduction to the volume canvasses the history of studies of American literature between 1820 and 1860 and makes a case for a singular endurance: that it is a literature dedicated to democracy. The introduction also frames the volume’s contribution as pointing to new directions in the field and summarizes the essays.

This chapter examines the critical discussions of Walt Whitman by Richard Chase and Jane Bennett in order to show how critics have used the poet to address the disenchanting political, social, and cultural conditions of their own times, particularly Cold War normativity and drastic climate change respectively. Beyond offering critiques of their times, however, critics have discussed Whitman to suggest alternatives that foster positive attachments to social and environmental justice. Contending that critics always create a “Whitman” to suit their own investments, the chapter urges critics to be explicit about those investments in the poet. Doing so, the chapter argues, frees Whitman from the need to speak the critic’s investments, while allowing criticism to play a more positive role in the present.

By 1880, the argument between spiritualism and neurology ultimately turned on methodology as much as on the question of faith. What counts as evidence of experience, whether that experience is of internal symptoms or external events? In answer, spiritualists championed human testimony while neurologists such as Beard saw in it only conscious and unconscious deceptions. Reflecting on his own experiences with mediums such as Leonora Piper in “The Confidences of a ‘Psychical Researcher’” (1909), William James confronted these issues as a scientist fascinated by the supernormal. He laments that, though he has spent the last twenty-five years trying to understand psychical phenomena, he is no closer to an explanation. He remains baffled by the quandary of evidence in spiritualism, the purported need to delineate “honest” occurrences from fraudulent practitioners. How can scientists make this distinction with a straight face, James asks, when they themselves often fudge their public performances? He recalls a time he did just this as an assistant for a lecture on nervous physiology at Harvard University. The goal of the lecture was to display the reflex action of a turtle's heart, but the heart's muscles and nerves were so exhausted they could no longer even perform the reflex. All they could do was arrest motion, and they did that much too perfectly.

One can easily imagine that Edgar Allan Poe experienced a jolt of recognition as he sat down to read Robert Montgomery Bird's Sheppard Lee; Written by Himself (1836). Published anonymously by Harper and Brothers, Sheppard Lee is a novel of metempsychosis in which Lee's spirit inhabits and reanimates a succession of corpses, including a gouty brewer, a dandy on the make for a rich wife, and a Virginia slave hanged for insurrection. Not only playing on Poe's favorite terrain of unmoored souls, Bird turns this potentially gothic conceit into comedy. As it turns out (and much to Poe's displeasure), the metempsychosis in Sheppard Lee is all a dream. Poe's review of the novel for the Southern Literary Messenger judges Bird's handling of the transmigration of souls to be both a literary and medical problem. “The chief source of interest in such narrative,” chides Poe, “is, or should be, the contrasting of these varied events […] upon a character unchanging – except as changed by the events.” Rather, Lee “partially loses, and partially does not lose, his identity, at each transmigration,” robbing the narrative as a whole of consistency.