This article aims to test the limits of current assessments of the New Negro renaissance, which tend to emphasize either its investment in cultural nationalism or its Pan-African focus, by exploring the international contours of The Crisis under Du Bois’s editorship. Recent analysis of The Crisis has paid considerable attention to the productive juxtaposition of what Anne Carroll has termed “protest and affirmation,” whereby Du Bois positioned reports on racial violence next to accounts of African American achievements in order to prompt acknowledgement of the realities of racism. But such criticism has focussed almost exclusively upon Du Bois’s treatment of American issues, overlooking his sustained interest in international cultural and political concerns. Focussing on the editorial framing of Indian nationalism, this article contends that the common distinctions drawn between internationalism and nationalism are too simplistic to accommodate The Crisis's formulation of cultural nationalism by way of internationalism. Indeed, scrutiny of the magazine's formal texture, which stages dynamic interplay between poetry, short fiction, investigative journalism, photography, readers' letters and political cartoons, reveals tensions that animate Du Bois's project, not least his dependence upon colonialist ways of seeing and a narrative of racial unity across the African diaspora that serves to elide cultural and historical specificity.

Most criticism of Nathaniel Hawthorne's Novel The Marble Faun has focussed on its many images of domestic containment, its supposed argument in favor of Christian idealism, as well as Hawthorne's apparent “castration” of the American sculptor Kenyon – just another in a long list of the author's male protagonists who succumb to a mixture of self-doubt (Dimmesdale, in The Scarlet Letter), narcissism (Coverdale, in The Blithedale Romance), and the allure of the chaste virgin (Holgrave, in The House of the Seven Gables). This essay, however, argues that Miriam, the novel's chief female protagonist, actually completes a complicated “liberation” from the proscriptions (as Hawthorne envisioned them) of her gender, enacted by her embrace of multiple, ancient, and organic symbols. Through a simultaneous analysis of the American music icons Madonna and Lady Gaga, we find that Hawthorne engages a complex set of ideational forces – misogyny, Catholicism, and female eros – as Miriam emerges, like these famous pop stars, as an independent artist, a position that not one of the author's male protagomists is able to attain. In this sense, Miriam may be reconsidered Hawthorne's internationalized Hester, or, more aptly, his mature Pearl.

Ralph Waldo Emerson's delivery of his essay “England” at Manhattan’s Clinton Hall on 22 January 1850 was one of the highest-profile of his performance career. He had recently returned from his triumphant British speaking tour with a radically revised view of transatlantic relations. In a New York still in shock from the Anglophobic urban riots of the previous winter, media observers were prepared to find a great deal of symbolism in both Emerson's new message and his idiosyncratic style of performance. This essay provides a detailed account of the context, delivery and conflicting newspaper readings of this Emerson appearance. Considering the lecture circuit as part of broader performance culture and debates over Anglo-American physicality and manners, it reveals how the press seized on both the “England” talk itself and aspects of Emerson's lecturing style as a means of shoring up civic order and Anglo-American kinship. I argue for a reexamination of the textual interchanges of nineteenth-century oratorical culture, and demonstrate how lecture reports reconnect us to forgotten means of listening through texts and discursive contests over the meaning of public speech.

This paper involves a close reading of Herman Melville's poem “On the Photograph of a Corps Commander,” published in Melville's 1866 collection Battle-Pieces. Realizing that Melville's poem is one of the first descriptions (ekphrases) of a photograph in verse, the paper explores how Melville's poem uses physiognomy to describe the subject of the photograph: an American Civil War general, who is only identified as “the Corps Commander.” In this way, Melville's poem reflects the nineteenth-century philosophical and popular notions of photography. These notions came to regard photography as a Neoplatonic medium capable of recording and revealing the inner character of its subjects. Relying on these conceptions of photography, Melville's poem describes the photograph of the Corps Commander as having the power to reveal the Platonic absolute of American masculinity, and thus it comes to hail the photograph as a semi-sacred image that has the power to draw Anglo-Saxon American men into a common brotherhood.

Writing on such diverse works as Shakespeare's King Lear, Wallace Stevens's “Sunday Morning” and Vincente Minnelli's The Bandwagon, Stanley Cavell is a philosopher consistently moved to philosophize in the realm of the aesthetic. Cavell invokes Stevens, particularly, at moments of his oeuvre both casual and constructive. In a commemorative address of the “Pontigny-en-Amérique” encounters at Mount Holyoke College in 2006, Cavell takes Stevens as his direct subject. During the original Pontigny colloquia, held during the wartime summers of 1942–44, some of the leading European figures in the arts and sciences (among them Hannah Arendt and Claude Lévi-Strauss) gathered at Mount Holyoke with their American peers (Stevens, John Peale Bishop and Marianne Moore) for conversations about the future of human civilization and the place of philosophy in a precarious world. Stevens suggested at the Pontigny meeting that the philosopher, compared unfavourably to the poet, “fails to discover.” As it is precisely Cavell's acknowledgement of the accidental or the unexpected as displaced from philosophy that draws him to the writings of Stevens, the Mount Holyoke encounters promise an illuminating dialogue between the two. The affinity between such central champions of the poetic dimension of American philosophy is sometimes obvious, more times in question.

This article takes as its starting point Stephen Fredman's claim that women are “effaced” from Paul Auster's The Invention of Solitude, and notes that this claim is contradictory, given the centrality of Anne Frank to the text. This article attempts to account for that contradiction by arguing that Anne Frank is enlisted in Auster's text as a means of providing consolation for the loss of Auster's father; indeed, Frank is enlisted as a figure for Auster's father. It is argued that Frank can be read, if problematically, and not entirely successfully, as a Levinasian “other” within Auster's text, something which influences the act of self-representation in The Invention of Solitude and necessitates consideration of the text as autobiography.

From his position as editor of the Nation from 1865 until 1899, E. L. Godkin steered one of the liberal standard-bearers in a transatlantic network of cosmopolitan liberals. From this position he helped define nineteenth-century cosmopolitan liberalism. However, while Godkin fitted in the mainstream of liberal thought in 1865, by the time he retired he occupied the conservative fringe. Godkin never made the transition from a nineteenth-century cosmopolitan liberalism to a newer nationalistic democratic liberalism because democracy failed him. Instead of peace, commerce, and learning, democracy created an American Empire rooted in war, protectionism, ignorance, jingoism, and plunder, culminating in the Spanish–American War. Godkin's critique of American imperialism was thus based on his pessimistic but perceptive reading of the flaws of American democracy. Godkin believed that the rise of “jingoist” democracy had doomed the American “experiment” and thought that the nation had slipped into the historical, degenerative cycle of empire. By tracing Godkin's increasingly bitter warnings about the dangers of democracy in the second half of the nineteenth century, we can catch a glimpse of a dying worldview that questioned the ability of democracy to act as a moral force in the world.

David Margrett was a black missionary sent by the Countess of Huntingdon to preach to slaves in South Carolina and Georgia in 1774. Margrett did not confine his preaching in America to spiritual matters, instead speaking out against the system of slavery itself, and offering himself as a “second Moses.” Margrett's message was not well received by authorities in South Carolina, indeed he was fortunate to escape with his life. This article argues that Margrett was a product both of his evangelical training, where speaking out on important matters was encouraged, and also of his British environment, where anti-slavery voices were becoming increasingly prominent. The story of David Margrett demonstrates how black Britons received and interpreted the message of Christianity, and in particular how they used their faith as a means to attack slavery.