This essay uses concepts drawn from the field of New Materialism, which posits that material objects possess forms of agency that shape human culture rather than just being passively acted upon, to move the history of the book beyond common assumptions that “the book” is a physically coherent and obviously identifiable entity. Looking closely at how the transportation infrastructure of the nineteenth-century print market determined and complicated American understandings of what a book was, it uses the legal and aesthetic debates triggered by evolving distinctions between bound and unbound texts to explore the historically malleable nature of “the book.” Concentrating particularly on the US postal system, which constantly struggled to define and regulate the printed matter passing through it during the nineteenth century as publishers sought to access cheaper circulation rates by presenting book-like material in periodical formats, this study of quasi-books ranges from Washington Irving’s Sketch Book (1819–1820) through the “mammoth weeklies” of the 1840s to the “Library” series of the 1870s.

This essay examines how nineteenth-century American literature paved the way for the modern exposure of private life in such disparate venues as the gossip column, social media, and reality television. In particular, this essay examines the sketch form, a popular nineteenth-century prose genre that has often been characterized as a minor form in comparison to the novel. In examining the history of the sketch form, this essay shows how the sketch conveyed reservations about the interiority and exposures central to the novel form. As practiced by Washington Irving, the earliest popularizer of this genre, the sketch advocated respectful discretion, the avoidance of private matters, and social stasis, the latter of which positioned the sketch in opposition to the social mobility characteristic of the novel. Irving presented the sketch as the genre of literary discretion, but its latter practitioner, Nathaniel Parker Willis, used the sketch to divulge confidences and violate social decorum. Willis adapted the sketch to become a precursor of the gossip column and to mirror the novel form in exposing private life.

Follows the American consuls as they begin to become cultural brokers linking Americans to remnants of the great Mediterranean empires as America begins to consider an imperialistic turn in the wake of the Monroe Doctrine.

The complicated relationship between American and European cultural production, particularly in the nineteenth century, is the subject of this chapter. American essayists of this period were, on the one hand, greatly influenced by the literature and culture of Europe and sought to absorb its lessons into their own writing. On the other, these same essayists pushed back against the idea that European writing should be their primary influence. Instead, they frequently critiqued Europe from afar and sought to develop a new idiom and fresh form of expression unique to the United States. Writers like Washington Irving, Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Edgar Allan Poe, Frederick Douglass, Henry James, and Henry David Thoreau explored the many tensions between the United States and Europe in their essays and used them to debate the extent to which America should remain in Europe’s cultural shadow.

This chapter delivers the rich history of the American comic essay. From its inception in the seventeenth century, sociopolitical concerns have dominated the genre. Borrowing from British sources and employing features common to humorous writing, the American comic essay customizes these for an American public using national imagery, local allusions, and distinctly American language. Earlier humorists voiced independent religious and political ideologies even before the formation of the new nation. Later, fictional personae expressed themselves in hyperbolic style and used vernacular and vulgar language, laden with irony and sarcasm, to capture the discontinuities of the industrializing nation. Articulating ethical visions of the new democracy, literary comedians like Artemus Ward expanded the naïve, deadpan voice brought to international prominence by Mark Twain. Later essayists maintained the rhetoric, persona, exaggeration, and irony that caricature American pragmatism, and further expanded the range of themes to include personal psychology, sexuality, and other once taboo topics. The chapter’s final pages feature the diverse contemporary landscape of American humor writing.

The chapter shows the outsize influence of the British periodical essay tradition, represented in publications like Addison and Steele’s Spectator (1711– 12), on eighteenth-century American periodical essays. The British series presented themselves as the musings of fictional personae who lived in cities. The persona (almost always male) wandered about town, reflecting on what he observed and overheard in coffeehouses, streets, theaters, and other places of business or leisure. He was often diverted and sometimes frustrated by his fellow citizens; he also strived to enlighten with casual criticism of the arts or musings on the relevance of religion and history to everyday life. A pervasive, low-level irony was common in these writings. American essayists such as Benjamin Franklin, Washington Irving, and Judith Sargent Murray borrowed from the British model, customizing it for an American readership. The most original early American essay series sketch in their personae a knowing independence of mind amid a distracted and unreflective urban crowd, a rhetorical standpoint that paradoxically would come to define a newly nationalistic body of literature in the nineteenth century.

This essay examines the importance of unoriginality in nineteenth-century American literature, showing how imitation and conventionality affirmed writers’ respectability and provided important legitimizing credentials. By way of illustration, this essay considers the career of Washington Irving, who presented himself as a guardian of literary tradition and repeatedly narrated the virtues of allowing the past to shape the future. As Irving’s career evidences, nineteenth-century readers did not particularly prize originality but instead found value in the familiar and conventional.

This chapter argues for the rebirth of pastoral in the twenty-first century: as a genre responsive to climate change, mindful of the extinction of many species, and bearing the unique insights of indigenous peoples, with their memory of past catastrophes and their vision for a sustainable future. Woven into this argument are three classic American authors -- Washington Irving, Henry David Thoreau, and Herman Melville – each preoccupied with the subjection of Native peoples, but imagining very different fates for them. In Irving, the ruthless ascendency of colonial settlers makes Native demise a foregone conclusion. Moby-Dick, on the other hand, tells a more conflicting story. In spite of the casual reference to the “extinction” of the Pequots, the persistence of Native characters throughout the novel suggests that they might be here to stay. It is Tashtego’s “red arm and hammer” that we see at the book’s climactic end. Thoreau also equivocates, at one point showing the Abenaki as more firmly ensconced in their habitat than he himself can ever be. In this way, he looks forward to the pastoral affirmation of indigenous survival in the philosophy of Kyle Powys Whyte, and the climate activism of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe.