The intellectual legacy of the American Revolution has cast a long shadow over the study of American fiction. Its enduring narrative of a “nation conceived in liberty” as an “asylum for freedom,” reinforced most recently in Eric Foner's book The Story of American Freedom, perpetuates the conviction of an American commitment to liberation. The early secular models of individualism, Robinson Crusoe, Franklin's Autobiography, and Crévecoeur, promised an uncomplicated release from Old World constraints to the opportunities of a mobile and open society. This expectation of a new and higher individualism, either in democratic society or as often in a space of Edenic openness, until recently shaped our understanding of the culture of the early republic and its literature. As F. O. Matthiessen wrote in his classic work on the writers of the American Renaissance, “They felt that it was incumbent upon their generation to give fulfillment to the potentialities freed by the Revolution, to provide a culture commensurate with America's political opportunities.” Beginning in the 1980s, critics challenging the depth of revolutionary ideology have questioned its influence on the writings of the period. With roots in feminism, reader response theory, postcolonialism, and popular culture, these writers have emphasized in Jane Tompkins's term the “cultural ‘work’” this fiction was “designed to do” in shaping the nascent society.

I begin with a foundational premise: that the basic beliefs about truth and morality that undergird a culture — any culture — are social and discursive constructions. I cannot establish this claim with absolute certainty, although I can provide the reasoning behind such an assertion. I can furnish models that show the explanatory power of such an assertion, and I can provide examples of people who use the premise to useful ends. But finally, the regime of truth I propose — one based on the belief that all truth is provisional and endemic to the culture that produces it — is one accepted on faith. In accepting it, I also accept as credible the rules of meaningmaking, the procedures, the heuristics, and the institutions through which the authority of truths are established in the culture(s) of which I consider myself a part. I can enter into dialogue with the community of those who, at least for the purposes of conversation, share these basic premises with me. With those who do not, I am at an impasse.

To a remarkable degree the literary works of Herman Melville (1819–91) have been read as subversive to traditional American religious aspirations. Some early reviewers, while praising the vivid recreations of the smell of salt air and the taste of hardtack, noted the blasphemy, perversion, and immoral elements they perceived in Melville's narratives of life among the peoples of Polynesia. Especially prominent for reviewers were Melville's literary assaults on Christian missionaries. Later, as his career progressed, he appeared to abandon the vivid for the mystifying and turned to regaling his readers with profundities, allegory, and metaphysics, or so the critics said. Melville's literary reputation glowed warmly for a short while, cooled, then died. As from the dead, the reputation was reborn in the 1920s.

On June 21, 1901, Samuel and Olivia Clemens and their daughter Jean ensconced themselves for the summer at Kane Camp, a “little bijou of a dwelling-house,” Clemens called it, on the south end of Ampersand Bay on Lower Saranac Lake in upstate New York. The family nicknamed the cottage The Lair. “Everyone knows what a lair is,” Clemens said; “lairs do generally contain dangerous animals, but I bring tame ones to this one.” As we shall see, danger did lurk in The Lair that summer, in the thought and writing of Clemens himself.

And so Missouri has fallen, that great State! Certain of her children have joined the lynchers, and the smirch is upon the rest of us. That handful of her children have given us a character and labeled us with a name; and to the dwellers in the four quarters of the earth we are “lynchers,” now, and ever shall be. For the world will not stop and think – it never does, it is not its way; its way is to generalize from a single sample. It will not say “Those Missourians have been busy eighty years in building an honorable good name for themselves; these hundred lynchers down in the corner of the State are not real Missourians, they are bastards.” No, that truth will not enter its mind; it will generalize from the one or two misleading samples and say “The Missourians are lynchers.” It has no reflection, no logic, no sense of proportion. With it, figures go for nothing; to it, figures reveal nothing, it cannot reason upon them rationally; it is Brother J. J. infinitely multiplied; it would say, with him, that China is being swiftly and surely Christianized, since 9 Chinese Christians are being made every day; and it would fail, with him, to notice that the fact that 33,000 pagans are born there every day, damages the argument. It would J-J Missouri, and say “There are a hundred lynchers there, therefore the Missourians are lynchers;” the considerable fact that there are two and a half million Missourians who are not lynchers would not affect their verdict any more than it would affect Bro. J. J.'s.

Literary historians or biographers who stay interested in a particular author drift in opposite directions. Some, jaded or disillusioned, fixate on that author's personal and even artistic flaws, eventually sounding as if they could have done the primary works better themselves. Others keep getting more and more tolerant toward their vulnerably human subject, often ending up as protective. I would be delighted if pinpoint scholarship could prove that Mark Twain was an avatar of antiracism. But I hope for too much. Throughout his career Twain could aim some stereotyping invective and belittling humor at several groups, most notably the Chinese, the Irish, and American Indians while, like his educated contemporaries, applying labels of race and nationality both casually and interchangeably. So, to narrow down, I would be delighted if Twain emerged – intellectually, emotionally, and politically – as a champion of African Americans or, better still, as a humanist who essentially considered them his peers by birth rather than pitiable victims of bias and social injustice. Not incidentally, I may be making two unforgivable mistakes by narrowing down to Twain's attitudes about African Americans. First, any posing of the matter in that binary way accepts race as a scientifically definable entity in effect or, to use currentspeak, reifies race as a concrete reality. Second, posing the matter in terms of black versus white forgets the much broader process in the United States during much of Twain's lifetime when the privileging label of white was often denied to many nationalities from Eastern Europe and the Middle East and – most egregiously – to the Japanese and Chinese. We ponder too little the fact that Samuel L. Clemens was made inescapably conscious that his determinable ancestors on both sides rated clearly as Anglo-Saxon, the self-proclaimed highest, only unimpeachable level of whiteness.

In an 1849 sketch, bookseller William R. Davis described the contents of a whimsical “curiosity shop,” stocked solely with clichés. Merchandise included “The finger that's in every body's pie,” “Some of the spice of Life,” “A rusty link from the bond of friendship,” “The bridle used in curbing the passions,” and “One of the bowels of the earth.” The humor of Davis's sketch rested on its ability to defamiliarize everyday tropes to the point where vehicle overwhelmed tenor, literalizing the figurative and making the reader aware of the submerged discourses upon which such figures relied. Davis's humorous exploration of conventional rhetoric resonates strongly today, for cultural historians have taken a comparable linguistic turn, exposing and exploring the figurative dimensions of ostensibly literal discourses. Recent studies in composition pedagogy, popular culture, theology, natural history, genre analysis, and historiography have all emphasized the extent to which figurative discourse structures and defines the very fields it purports to explain. As Hayden White argues, “All systems of knowledge begin … in a metaphorical characterization of something presumed to be unknown in terms of something presumed to be known, or at least familiar.” Yet while this linguistic self-consciousness has greatly inspired the study of, among other areas, traditional historiography, it has scarcely had an impact on our understanding of literary historiography. Few have studied antebellum figures of speech as closely as Davis, nor have they tested antebellum literary historical and critical theories by the standards or techniques of figurative analysis. Such an exercise, I contend, would reveal much about both the theory and practice of literary canonization in 19th-century America.

Describing their move north in an escape from slavery, William and Ellen Craft's slave narrative, Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom (1860), offers a peculiar form of travel literature. The notion that slave narratives chronicle movement has not gone unrecognized. Indeed, scholarship on 20th-century African-American literature often argues the thematic importance of a journey motif that some trace to antebellum America. Blyden Jackson, for example, notes that African-American “literature bears within itself content, as well as themes and moods, reflecting the Great Migration” (xv), the period from early to mid-20th century, which Marcus E. Jones says actually began before the Civil War when blacks fled the South for the urban, industrial North (30). And Robert Stepto has identified two basic types of journeys in African-American literature: one of “ascent” in which “an ‘enslaved’ and semiliterate figure [travels] on a ritualized journey to a symbolic North,” and one of “immersion,” which is a “ritualized journey into a symbolic South” (6). Such discussions of journey motifs, however, have not yet led to an examination of slave narratives as travel literature.

As white men surrendered to carnal impulses and lost control of their bodily flows, they became slaves. Such sensational conclusions were standard fare in a 19th-century rhetorical universe where self-reliance as a corporeal principle was also an issue of political gravity. Far from signaling a breakdown of the body's potential to analogize the body politic, the representational slide from Southern bondage to white corporeality is of tremendous national use. The “natural” body – especially in “aberrant” manifestations that violate ethical, hygienic, and democratic codes broadly classed under the dictum of self-reliance – is an enabling construction that allows white men to concentrate on disruptions in their own bodies while overlooking disruption in the body politic. The linguistic inequality that reads the white male's private body as the public's collective body acts in tandem with political inequality by misrepresenting the scope and character of African-American servitude. American liberal reformers participated in a political distortion by talking about the body as though it had the same valence as the body politic. Equipped with a catachrestic sensibility that (mis)understood the citizen's sexuality via national policies on race, a wide range of cultural critics including medical crusaders, abolitionists, educators, and transcendentalists reconceived of the abstract body politic in fairly specific, highly personal, and ultimately privatizing terms. But what happened when that abstract body became culturally particular, when, for instance, the transparency of white males became li bidinally bound to castigated representations of blackness? As an analogy for certain sexual behaviors, slavery plainly suggested the dire consequences of improper corporeal conduct.

Simon Legree's taunting invitation to “join [his] church” reminds us that the novel routinely credited with abolishing slavery relied for part of its force on anxieties surrounding religious conversion. Although conversion as the emotional surrender to faith under one or another form of Protestantism remained the norm when Harriet Beecher Stowe was writing Uncle Tom's Cabin, as many as 700,000 Americans did join the Roman Catholic Church as converts in the 19th century. The middle third of the century also saw the arrival of nearly 3 million Catholic immigrants, whose perceived intemperance, sexual license, and conspiratorial designs on American institutions animated white Protestant preaching and political action more consistently than did the evils of slavery or racism.

Recent scholarship in the history of American art has uncovered the deep social, political, and economic context within which specific inividuals invented highly charged (and frequently contested) visions of the American landscape. Drawing attention away from the naturalizing tendency of criticism that emphasizes landscape painting as a reflection of national and transcendental ideals, this kind of analysis has brought new richness to the study of landscapes, weaving political and social history into the criticism of American art. Charting paintings as they function within the constellations of patronage, intellectual history, and reception, these new histories help us understand the cultural work of landscape in the 19th-century United States.

On the evening of March 31, 1895, three hundred of New York City's most notable artists and patrons assembled in Madison Square Garden to honor Chicago architect Daniel H. Burnham. Led by Burnham, Chicago had bested New York in a hotly contested competition for sponsorship of the Columbian World Exposition that proudly exhibited the nation's Gilded Age accomplishments in art, architecture, and technology. Astride New York's most prestigious public square, Madison Square Garden might well have been built for the occasion. Arriving by carriages in livery, New York's fin de siècle elite, dressed in top hats, black ties, and tails, leisurely entered architect Stanford White's resplendent edifice, accompanied by their glitteringly attired female companions. Atop the Garden's Florentine tower rested a nude sculpture of Diana, Greek goddess of the hunt.

Robert Scott Duncanson, who lived and worked primarily in Cincinnati, Ohio, but also in Michigan, Canada, and Europe, was one of only a few known African-American landscape painters in the 19th century, and one of even fewer to gain a regional, national, and international reputation. His Blue Hole, Flood Waters, Little Miami River (1851) is painted in a style typical of the Hudson River school: a panoramic view of a quiet and apparently pristine wilderness, known then as a popular beauty spot near Cincinnati (Figure 1). The dense forest that encloses the pool, with broken timber around the edges and two drowned branches projecting above the surface of the water, implies isolation and ruggedness. The small, slightly ragged youths fishing in the foreground, though, are more than generic props; they are an image of the desired effect of nature on the often socially mixed residents of the river bottoms, and of Cincinnati in general. The rustic fisherman absorbed and at ease amid a rugged Western landscape loses himself in nature, but instead of making him wild, the experience refines as it acts “But to bind him to his native mountains more.” The image of the two men – as, for example, opposed to figures of genteel tourists – embedded in their native lakes and forests offered reassurance and evidence to local boosters of the positive impact of nature. Nature, in this concept, exerted a softening, soothing influence on those who experienced it, akin to women's moral influence on those within the domestic sphere.

In George Washington Harris's Reconstruction sketch, “Trapping a Sheriff, Almost,” a rowdy Southern hero named Wirt Staples thunders outside of a courthouse waving a terrified African-American boy over his head in one hand and a dried venison steak in the other. With his muscles moving “like rabbits onder the skin,” and his hips and thighs “[playing] like the swell on the river” (Sut Lovingood, 244), Wirt Staples represents Harris's fantasy of Southern superiority reemergent amidst Reconstruction chaos. The sketch ends with Wirt throwing the venison steak at a Reconstruction judge's head and kicking the boy through the shop window of a watch repairman, assaulting a figure of Northern authority and brutally exiling the black threat from Southern territory. As a final, triumphant gesture, Wirt saddles his horse and bellows, “The Lion's loose, shet your doors!” (Sut Lovingood, 254). The collection in which the sketch appeared, Sut Lovingood: Yarns Spun by a “Nat'ral Born Durn'd Fool” (1867). was published by a Northern press and advertised along with titles of parlor humor such as Dick's Ethiopian Scenes, Tambo's End-Men's Gags, and Brudder Bons' Book of Stump Speeches. “It would be difficult,” the advertisement assures readers, “to cram a larger amount of pungent humor into 300 pages than will be found in this really funny book” (Sut Lovingood, 312).

C. Vann Woodward, in his Origins of the New South, suggestively links the economic revival in the South in the late 19th century with a literary revival, a revival that he judges as distinctly inferior to its economic counterpart: “For all the shortcomings and the comparative brevity of the revival … the Southern writers undeniably possessed solid virtues. Among them, however, one will search in vain for a realistic portrayal of their own times … the writers were too preoccupied with the quaint ‘types’ of the hinterland to notice what was going on in their own parlors” (164). Preoccupied with a nostalgic vision of region, Southern writers failed, it is generally agreed, to represent significant social changes in realistic terms. More recently, Jules Chametzky has echoed Vann Wood-ward's observation when he wrote that “local color and regionalism … became … toward the end of the nineteenth century, a strategy, largely, for ignoring or minimizing social issues of great significance” (21). Of course, not all local colorists ignored or minimized these issues – only those who I've taken to calling “weak local colorists.” Writers like Thomas Nelson Page and Joel Chandler Harris looked back, nostalgically, to a romanticized past; in flight from their present, they used the plantation past as a way of attempting to justify the status quo in the South at the turn of the centnry.

The January 3, 1900, edition of the popular, New York City newspaper the World contains an advertisement for a new edition of The Century Dictionary & Cyclopedia & Atlas (Figure 1). The strength of this reference guide, according to the full-page advertisement, is the volume's war maps. The presentation of battle cartography “enable[s] one to trace instantly the movements of every important campaign on land or sea, the routes of invading armies, raids, etc., placing and dating on the maps the battles, sieges and blockades not only of ancient and medieval times, but also those of the year just ended – and this without any complexity in the maps themselves.” In case the reader needed to be reminded about recent wars, the advertisement has enormous graphic representations of “Africa” and the “Philippine Is.” The map of the Philippines would have immediately signified the Spanish-American (1898) and Philippine-American (1899–1902) Wars to readers, conflicts that the pages of the mass media covered widely.

In 1915, Max and Dave Fleischer inaugurated a series of animated cartoons called Out of the Inkwell. The Out of the Inkwell name, with its evocation of a single artist's pen-and-ink drawings, conjured up an image of individualistic creativity and implied an unproblematic trajectory from the pen to the moving picture.

Critics seeking a paradigmatic moment in the history of Indian-white encounter will find few more suitable than the following from the life of Black Hawk, the Sauk rebel, U.S. prisoner of war, and subject if not author of the Life of Ma-Ka-Tai-Me-She-Kia-Kiak or Black Hawk (1833). The episode, reported by Thomas McKenney and James Hall in The Indian Tribes of North America (1836–44), occurred after Black Hawk's brief, spectacular resistance to removal had been violently quelled; after he had been taken on a humbling tour of the East; and after his rival, Keokuk, had been installed by the United States as tribal chief. McKenney and Hall pick up the story at the conference where Keokuk's ascendancy is announced:

They were then told by major Garland, that the President considered Keokuk the principal chief of the nation, and desired he should be acknowledged as such; he expected Black Hawk would listen, and conform to this arrangement. … From some mistake of the interpreter, Black Hawk understood that he was ordered to submit to the advice of Keokuk, and became greatly excited. Losing all command of himself he arose, trembling with anger, and exclaimed: “I am a man — an old man. I will not obey the counsels of anyone! I will act for myself; no one shall govern me. …”

Keokuk, in a low tone, said to him: “Why do you speak thus before white men? You trembled — you did not mean what you said.

Henry James's novella Washington Square (1880) is very much a novel of place and proved readily adaptable to the stage precisely because it was so limited in locale. Whereas Henri Balzac's similar tale Eugénie Grandet is named in honor of its heroine, James's work is designated by the neighborhood in which most of its action takes place. One could argue that the house in which Catherine Sloper's ill-fated courtship takes place is virtually a character in the novella, seducing the opportunist Morris Townsend more effectively than Catherine herself ever could (Figure 1).

With P. T. Barnum's purchase of the American museum in 1840, freak shows became an organized and profitable institution that systematically used juxtaposition, innovative advertising, and questions of truth and humbug to entice audiences. Along with “scientifically” sanctioned pamphlets and cartes de visite, exhibits such as wild savages from around the world, human-animal hybrids, hermaphrodites, and armless and legless wonders played with the boundaries between self and other. Audiences could gaze safely without compunction about the displayed body as long as these distinctions were maintained within the confines of the show. But as social anxieties about difference intensified in the first few decades of the 20th century, a greater need to solidify the boundaries between black and white, male and female, and abled and disabled made this type of entertainment more disturbing and, at times, even dangerous. These concerns marked the beginning of the end for freak shows. By the 1920s, their popularity was not only threatened by changing attitudes in medical science and the rise of the film industry, but also by the aftermath of World War I.