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Chapter 3 - The Literature of Radicalism

from Part I - Concepts

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 March 2025

By
J. Michelle Coghlan
Edited by
John D. Kerkering
John D. Kerkering
Affiliation:
Loyola University, Chicago
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Summary

In light of police raids and de facto forms of censorship, Shelley Streeby has powerfully pointed to what she aptly terms “the limits of print as an archive of radical memory,” and, so too, the limits within American literary studies in so far recognizing the various and voluminous genres of nineteenth-century radical print culture – from fiery speeches and satirical strike songs to political pamphlets, worker song-poems, insurgent novels, and experimental biography – as literature. This chapter explores the ways American literature nevertheless archives radical movements and the ways nineteenth-century radicals engaged with and rethought the canon of American literature. It also considers how nineteenth-century US radicalism shaped American literature more broadly by turning to Henry James’s 1886 novel The Bostonians as an unexpectedly rich archive of radical abolition and its legacies.

Keywords

nineteenth-century American literatureradicalismHenry JamesThe Bostoniansabolitionanarchism
Type
Chapter
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The Cambridge Companion to Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Politics , pp. 51 - 66
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2025

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References

Further Reading

Boase, Paul H., ed. The Rhetoric of Protest and Reform: 1878–1898. Ohio University Press, 1980.Google Scholar
Castronovo, Russ. Beautiful Democracy: Aesthetics and Anarchy in a Global Era. University of Chicago Press, 2009.Google Scholar
Coghlan, J. Michelle. Sensational Internationalism: The Paris Commune and the Remapping of American Memory in the Long Nineteenth Century. Edinburgh University Press, 2016.Google Scholar
Darsey, James. The Prophetic Tradition and Radical Rhetoric in America. New York University Press, 1997.Google Scholar
DeLamotte, Eugenia C. Gates of Freedom: Voltairine de Cleyre and the Revolution of the Mind. University of Michigan Press, 2010.Google Scholar
Funchion, John. “Critical Oversights: The Aesthetics and Politics of Reading The Bostonians.” The Henry James Review 34:3 (2013), 279–284.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Funchion, John. Novel Nostalgias: The Aesthetics of Antagonism in Nineteenth-Century U.S. Literature. Ohio State University Press, 2015.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Halker, Clark D. For Democracy, Workers, and God: Labor Song-Poems and Labor Protest, 1865–95. University of Illinois Press, 1991.Google Scholar
Jackson, Holly. American Radicals: How Nineteenth-Century Protest Shaped the Nation. Crown, 2019.Google Scholar
Kowal, Donna M. Tongue of Fire: Emma Goldman, Public Womanhood, and the Sex Question. State University of New York Press, 2016.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Packer, Barbara L. “The Hope of Reform.” In Bercovitch, Sacvan, ed., The Cambridge History of American Literature, Vol. 2: Prose Writings, 1820–1865. Cambridge University Press, 1995, 459–494.Google Scholar
Richards, Juno Jill. The Fury Archives: Female Citizenship, Human Rights, and the International Avant-Gardes. Columbia University Press, 2020.Google Scholar
Sartwell, Crispin. “Anarchism and Nineteenth-Century American Political Thought.” In Jun, Nathan J., ed., Brill’s Companion to Anarchism and Philosophy. Brill, 2018, 454–483.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Streeby, Shelley. “Looking at State Violence: Lucy Parsons, José Marti, and Haymarket.” In Castronovo, Russ, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Nineteenth-Century American Literature. Castronovo, Russ. Oxford University Press, 2014, 115–136.Google Scholar
Streeby, Shelley. Radical Sensations: World Movements, Violence, and Visual Culture. Duke University Press, 2013.Google Scholar

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