Before the 1950s, there was no ideologically coherent conservative movement in the United States to speak of, and no single party up to that point had a monopoly on conservatism as either a political expression or an ideological framework. The roots of American conservatism, however, stretch back to Edmund Burke’s critique of the French Revolution, John Adams’s contributions to the Federalist Party, and John C. Calhoun’s defense of southern regionalism, among other sources. During the nineteenth century, conservatism functioned in two registers: as an argument against precipitous social change and as an attitude in favor of the social and institutional hierarchies handed down through history. The tension between conservativism’s attitude in favor of hierarchy and its argument against change animates Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850), Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), and Frank J. Webb’s The Garies and Their Friends (1857). These three novels test arguments for social change – women’s rights, abolition, and interracial marriage, respectively – against attitudes in support of hierarchy, ultimately bringing conservatism into a reckoning with its own fundamental assumptions about history and authority.

Nineteenth-century American authors often sought diplomatic political appointments because these were understood to be comfortable positions that provided financial security, cultural enrichment, and leisure time for writing. One popular strategy for obtaining such an appointment was to write a campaign biography for a successful politician. Though overlooked today, the genre of the campaign biography, which dates from the 1820s, was important for American novelists such as William Dean Howells, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Lew Wallace, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. In fact, Hawthorne’s 1852 Life of Franklin Pierce irritated his contemporaries (including Henry David Thoreau and Herman Melville) and later became an important touchstone for literary scholars interested in the intersection of literary arts and national politics. Paying special attention to Hawthorne’s work, this chapter argues that, rather than characterize the campaign biography as an inartistic piece of propaganda written merely to secure a political appointment, we should instead understand it as a node in a wider network of literary and political narrative nonfiction genres – also including histories, travelogues, newspaper journalism, and slave narratives.

The chapter returns to what has been called the “central paradox of American history,” the ostensible contradiction between this nation’s declared liberal ideals (“all men” being promised the inalienable right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”) and its sanctioning of slavery, the supreme denial of liberty. It focuses on how antebellum debates (literary, political, and theological) over the moral and political legitimacy of slavery were ultimately debates over “personhood” in order to make clear that the conceptual category of the “person” (the center of liberal thought) needs to be understood as a historically contingent – rather than absolute – identity. Noting how deeply modern accounts of slavery remain indebted to the liberal presumption that slavery is wrong precisely to the extent that those enslaved possess a fixed, transhistorical personhood (a personhood that racism, ideology, or self-interest too often obscures), the chapter seeks to leave behind arguments over the conflict between slavery and liberalism and ultimately asks whether it is possible to imagine a liberatory politics that does not require the “person” to be at its center.

This chapter surveys queer theoretical investigations of nineteenth-century American literature while turning an eye to its future potential. Since the 1990s, the emergence of queer studies shifted focus away from the identitarian scope of lesbian and gay studies to one that engages queer acts, desires, objects, and temporality, to name a few. Queer offers a way out of that Foucaultian maxim, by which in the late nineteenth century the “homosexual became a species.” No longer needing to “know” if one was gay, the rest of the nineteenth century became ripe for a capacious engagement with bodies, affects, and desires. Despite this prominence in queer studies, trans studies is largely absent from early American literary studies. I argue that scholarly pushback on nineteenth-century sexology and its problematic theory of “inverts” has all but left the actual embodiments of those who thwarted gender to the wayside. Neither has the field confronted how nonwhite, brown, and Black people were marked via inversion, such as female hypermasculinity and male effeminacy. If queer studies revisited nineteenth-century literary texts with new vigor, this paper proposes the same through a trans studies reading of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Minister’s Black Veil,” Archibald Clavering Gunter’s A Florida Enchantment, and Charlotte Perkins Gillman’s Herland.

This chapter shows how, from Charles Brockden Brown’s Edgar Huntly to Jeff Barnaby’s Blood Quantum, American horror erupts out of the violence performed on indigenous people by white settler society, on people and land on the slavery plantation, and on citizens in the Global South and Middle East during period when the United States has extended and protected American global hegemony. By reading American colonialism and neo-imperialism as central to American extractivist capitalism, the chapter reveals how American horror also narrates the devastating violence done to the planet itself. The chapter observes that much American horror produced by and for white settler society represents settler violence against people and land as justified and regenerative, but it also discusses a number of less reactionary texts that make plain the horrific violence inherent in the capitalist colonial project.

This chapter explores the intersection between American horror and religion and how our understanding can benefit from an approach that recognizes how both subjects wrestle with what happens when human experience goes sideways, how people attempt to understand things beyond their experience, and how they address questions pertaining to why they are here and where they think they are going. While both clearly confront such key questions of human existence, religion frequently addresses them within expectations tied to core doctrines, beliefs, and practices, while horror more often reaches beyond those limits. And yet there are moments in which both kinds of texts overlap in that they share an interest in the kinds of overwhelming questions people ask in times of concern or crisis. This chapter explores several of those moments in a survey that ranges from American Puritan literature to Spiritualism, and then to the rise of modern Pentecostalism.

A dashing portrait of General Giuseppe Garibaldi filled the front page of the June 9, 1860 issue of Harper’s Weekly while an accompanying article fêted “the hero of the new Italian war,” extolling the “wonders” of his fight for freedom on two continents. “Of all the Italian patriots of 1848 he is, without a doubt, the ablest, most sensible, and most respectable,” Harper’s enthused, praising his certain success in this “new” attempt to unify the Italian peninsula as one state.1 Harper’s proved to be wrong – Italy didn’t unify until 1870 – but this minor setback did little to dampen American enthusiasm for the principled military strategist.2 After meeting the hero that same summer, Henry Adams observed to his brother Charles that Garibaldi “looked in his red shirt like the very essence and genius of revolution, as he is.”3 In comments such as these, as in the numerous celebrations of his character that appeared in the 1850s, Garibaldi embodies the ideals of republican revolution; no need to fear either a turn to terror or divided loyalties with such a “sensible” revolutionary leading the charge.

This essay focuses on two very different authors – Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864) and Theodore Winthrop (1828–1861) – whose novels show a wide range of intense, perverse, or unruly emotional and erotic attachments. The essay contrasts these authors to highlight the emergence of forms of shame, punishment, and discipline that were becoming dominant in the mid-nineteenth century. But the essay also shows the emergence of affective and erotic communities that were collective, sharing a coded language, forms of self-protection, and cultural companionship. These novels, in other words, demonstrate sexuality’s emergence not only in terms of individual bodies but also in those collective bodies known as subcultures.

Cormac McCarthy’s aesthetic choices make him as anachronistic and difficult to place as are many of his characters. While he shares some of the thematic preoccupations of modernism and postmodernism, he lacks most of the aesthetic markers of those movements. Given his varied style, it might be more promising to think of his work as hovering aesthetically between the naturalistic and the phantasmagoric in the manner of Hawthorne’s and Melville’s romance tradition. His aesthetic borrowings from the medium of film similarly seem to place his work in a grey area between objectivity and subjectivity. While McCarthy’s own consistent associations of aesthetic value with pain and loss contrast sharply with the disinterested conception of beauty propounded by Kant, his work seems much more attuned to Kant’s other source of aesthetic value, the sublime. But McCarthy’s version of the sublime is thoroughly naturalized and historicized, embracing human fragility and contingency. This aspect of McCarthy’s aesthetic, linked as it is to the cultural attitudes born of the nineteenth-century encounter between late Romanticism and naturalism, might help account for many readers’ sense that McCarthy’s work belongs to another time.