Economic Crisis and American Literature, 1819-1857
My dissertation demonstrates how literary responses to the United States’ first widespread financial crises—the Panics of 1819, 1837, and 1857—gave form to the abstract but increasingly violent forces governing the brave new economic world. Previous economic critics, working under the rubric of the New Historicism, tend to emphasize how literature rehearses arguments about the U.S. economy at the level of theme or plot. Such scholarship, however, obscures how literary form itself conveys economic policy. Over the course of this project’s five chapters, I argue that Washington Irving’s picturesque sketches (1819-20), James Fenimore Cooper’s discursive romances (1821-23), Ralph Waldo Emerson’s transcendentalist addresses (1837), Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s didactic allegories (1836-37), and Herman Melville’s anti-novel (1857) are fundamentally concerned with the economic problems of panics, including excess, abundance, and scarcity. Literary engagement with panic reveals itself, for example, in the sprawling style of Cooper’s The Spy advocates the expansion of free trade to spur the economy in the early 1820s. Performing opposite work, the carefully controlled allegory of Sedgwick’s “Who, and What, Has Not Failed” attempts to contain the rapid growth of the money supply in 1837. Most radically, Melville’s The Confidence-Man, in resisting narrative closure, belies the blind optimism in market outcomes driving investment in 1857. Through readings of an array of panic-era literature, then, this project concludes that the coincidence of crises and important moments in U.S. literary history, typically mentioned in standard histories as incidental, is no accident: financial distress demanded artistry, and literature thrived as the market crashed.
American Literature, Economic History, Antebellum America, the History of Capitalism, Literary Theory
Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations