Edgar Allan Poe and His Enemies

2018 ◽  
pp. 558-575
Author(s):  
Sandra Tomc
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Edgar Allan Poe ◽  
Psychological State ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Magazine Publishing ◽  
Magazine Industry ◽  
Nineteenth Century United States

This chapter looks at the dozens of enemies Poe acquired in the course of his career. Instead of understanding these enemies as a phenomenon peculiar to Poe and his individual psychological state, the chapter argues that enemies were a kind of dark, unconscious side of the friendship culture that prevailed in the magazine industry in the early nineteenth-century United States. At a time when magazines depended for their content and profitability on the voluntary labor of unpaid contributors, friendship culture, in which friends volunteered to write for the periodicals of other friends, was crucial to the functioning of the magazine publishing economy. But hatred and rage were also productive energies, goading writers to write for free for magazines as easily as friendly indebtedness. Examining Poe’s rancorous relationships with his fellow authors, this article argues that Poe’s many enemies were part of a larger economy of violent invective and grudges that formed a companion to the culture of friendship.

Extra-illustration, preservation and libraries in the nineteenth-century United States

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 81-105 ◽  
Author(s):  
Megan Walsh
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Information Organization ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
George Washington ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Past ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Nineteenth Century United States

Extra-illustration, usually considered an eighteenth-century and early-nineteenth-century British phenomenon, is abundantly present in the creative book practices of the late nineteenth-century United States, but it is often overlooked in scholarship. Analysing the collecting, cutting and pasting habits of Massachusetts banker Nathaniel Paine, this article argues that extra-illustration was closely connected to the then emerging modes of information organization that have since shaped modern libraries. Paine added hundreds of mass-produced images of US president George Washington to the volumes in his library, including a group of pamphlets printed just after Washington died in 1799. This unusual group of pamphlets, as well as Paine’s other extra-illustrative supplements to his volumes and scrapbooks, reveal an effort not only to preserve a particular version of the past but also to develop an indexing scheme built around pictures.

“Hindoo Marriage” and National Sovereignty in the Early-Nineteenth-Century United States

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian Connolly
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
Private International Law ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
National Sovereignty ◽  
The Law ◽  
Nineteenth Century United States ◽  
New Nation ◽  
Definition Of

This essay explored the concept of sovereignty in relation both to the legal definition of marriage within the emergent field of private international law and representations of “Hindoo” marriage in the early nineteenth century. I argue that in establishing national sovereignty the United States, paradoxically, had to give up a bit of sovereignty in order to be recognized as a sovereign nation. This was apparent in legal writings on marriage, wherein influential jurists like Joseph Story argued that a marriage legally recognized in one country was valid everywhere, even if it violated the domestic laws of a new nation. In order to deal with this paradox the cultural apparatus – in this case, print culture – worked to supplement the law. Missionary writings on supposedly “Hindoo” marriages and marital relations such as sati, child marriage, and infanticide supplemented the law by marking these kinds of relations, which would potentially have been legal in the US, as outside the logic of liberal democracy.

Normal Rights, Just New: Understanding the Judicial Enforcement of Socioeconomic Rights

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Fowkes
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
South Africa ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Political Rights ◽  
Inherent Property ◽  
Socioeconomic Rights ◽  
Nineteenth Century United States ◽  
Existing Structure

Abstract A common skeptical view holds that socioeconomic rights are a different kind of right than civil-political rights. Even those who support justiciable socioeconomic rights often see them as a different kind of right with special challenges. I argue that this view is wrong. What all these observers are reacting to is not an inherent property of socioeconomic rights: it is a contingent property of a situation in which judges are asked to enforce a rights claim without a pre-existing set of familiar public understandings of the right’s content and/or an existing structure of officials and procedures to give effect to that content. It is because the rights claim is new, and this is something that can be, and often is, true of rights across the spectrum. Any rights claim is problematic to enforce to the degree that it is new, but these obstacles can and do disappear if society changes and the claim becomes less new. In the first part of the Article, I seek to establish the accuracy of this argument, drawing on examples of rights distinctions from the nineteenth-century United States and rights across the spectrum displaying newness in contemporary South Africa and India. I then show how controlling for newness can help us to understand standard features of the socioeconomic rights debate: the ubiquitous, but misleading, negative–positive distinction; arguments about resources; Fuller’s endlessly cited polycentricity argument; and current controversial cases, such as the budget-shifting judicial enforcement of Latin American healthcare entitlements. These topics are central to our widespread intuition that socioeconomic rights are different; newness can help us to see that this intuition is misleading us, and by recalibrating the debate can filter out some distractions that have long dogged it.

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