Threshold States in the Immigrant Atlantic, 1789–1857

This chapter places the US Americas in the zone after the Atlantic revolutions of the era of world crisis but before the realization of a true democracy. In positioning them as such, it argues that in the first half of the nineteenth century the US Americas were neither an old nor a new world but some intermixture of the two. The figure of the radical immigrant emblematized this threshold state. These immigrants found the US Americas to be a zone that was on the verge of transformation into a fully realized democratic social polity but not quite there yet. As such, they created a formulation of citizenship that allegorized this midstate—“living death”—that reflected their sense of being between a subject and national, democratic citizen. It was the job of a German American genre—the “immigrant gothic”—involving canonical fiction like Herman Melville’s Pierre, German-language city mysteries, and reactionary nativist fantasias, to imagine what the redeemed social world desired by immigrant radicals might look like. Although these fictions found it comparatively easy to imagine the apocalypse, a completely redeemed democracy proved elusive. Instead, they came to dwell on the limited capacity of fiction to bring about radical historical transformation.

Hidden Dangers

By the late 1840s, a new genre of literature revealed deep concerns with corruption in the growing urban centers. City mysteries exposed a dark underworld of the metropolis, leading readers through smoky saloons, gambling dens, and brothels. More than any other “sin of the city,” urban gothic literature focused on prostitution. The female prostitute embodied the greatest antithesis to the ideal or “true” woman. Anticonvent literature often compared nuns to prostitutes, convents to brothels, priests to seducers, and Mother Superiors to madams. City mysteries mirrored convent narratives in their description of women being seduced into lives of misery and sexual deviance. Both convent narratives and city mysteries promised to unveil a hidden world of sin and debauchery for an eager readership. This chapter compares convent tales and city mysteries, focusing on the nun-prostitute figure and the ways in which this female archetype threatened nineteenth-century female gender norms.

Buying and Borrowing Books: Book Consumption In Late Nineteenth-Century Sweden (pp 121-154)

How did Swedish readers in the late nineteenth century acquire reading materials, and what books were the most popular? And how did their reading preferences change over time?A few unique, recently discovered sources, consisting of sales’ and borrowers’ ledgers from three different institutions – a parish library, a commercial lending library and a bookshop – can help to answer these questions. These three institutions represented key elements of the Swedish book trade, and together they served customers from the entire social spectrum, from farmhands, blacksmiths and labourers to bishops, noblemen and literary critics. Generally speaking, the Swedish reading public of the late nineteenth century was divided into two groups: those who bought books, and those who borrowed them. The bookshop was where all the latest books could be found, and Strindberg, Ibsen and Daudet were among the best-selling authors. The parish library, by contrast, had only a limited range of fiction – mainly written by an earlier generation of authors – and primarily acquired books that would enlighten and educate, rather than entertain. However, the members of the parish library preferred fiction above all, and over the years they transformed from omnivorous to discerning readers. The commercial lending library, which specialised in novels, attracted many bookworms, with some people borrowing from fifty to one hundred books a year, very often historical novels.Different customer groups seem to have had different literary preferences. The study shows for example that female customers of the bookshop tended to buy books on women’s emancipation, and preferred Tolstoy to Strindberg – who was the male customers’ favourite. And while romantic and gothic stories, and the so-called “city mysteries” by Eugène Sue were hugely popular among the students and the artisans of the commercial lending library, they aroused little interest among the bookshop’s customers.

The Devil in the Slum: American Urban Gothic

This chapter focuses on the emergence of American urban gothic in literature of the late Antebellum. From roughly 1840 to 1860 a community of writers organized an extant urban gothic vocabulary into a popular and influential subgenre, city-mysteries, which ostentatiously announced their link to the gothic novel. These mysteries were intimately intertwined with urban reportage of the so-called ‘flash press’ among other art forms, especially the stage.

Deformance, Performativity, Posthumanism

David S. Reynolds, “Deformance, Performativity, Posthumanism: The Subversive Style and Radical Politics of George Lippard’s The Quaker City” (pp. 36–64) The most interesting American example of the genre known as city-mysteries fiction, George Lippard’s The Quaker City (1844–45), while rich in characters, stymies the novelistic stability conventionally provided by the struggles of heroes against villains in the mystery genre. Lippard’s style thus gets foregrounded as the locus of morality and politics, displaying an acerbic, presurrealistic edge. The current essay surveys linguistic and generic deformations (alinear narrative, irony and parody, bizarre tropes, performativity, and periperformativity) and biological and material deformations (posthuman images, including animals, objects, sonic effects, and vibrant matter) in The Quaker City to suggest how Lippard stylistically reinforces his goal of satirizing literary and social conventions and of exposing what he regards as hypocrisy and corruption on the part of America’s ruling class.