The feminine figure of “Public Credit,” which appears prominently and frequently in early-eighteenth-century Whig texts, is a rich and complex symbolization of early liberal political and economic ideology. In readings of Joseph Addison, Daniel Defoe, and the Whig libertarians John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon (the collective authors of Cato's Letters, a polemic that had a major influence on American revolutionary ideology), I show that their representations of Credit speak not to the empirical truth of economic value but openly to its imaginary desirability. Credit thus represents a manifest political and cultural strategy of these Whig writers for articulating and defending the values of a liberal market society by representing them as desirable—or, in other words, as aesthetic values.

Recent accounts of genre have asserted that all texts participate in multiple genres and that genre works as a kind of contract between writers and readers. In the legal history of eighteenth-century British prosecutions for obscene libel and the reception history of gothic fiction at the turn of the nineteenth century, however, the model of genre as contract breaks down. At the end of the eighteenth century, several texts we now call gothic faced threatened prosecution under existing obscene libel laws. The reception histories of the fiction of Matthew Lewis, Charlotte Dacre, and Charles Robert Maturin demonstrate that public denouncements and threatened prosecution forced gothic texts, even as they theoretically participated in at least one genre, to belong to a legal category (obscenity) for which their writers never intended them.

The multiethnic and multilingual character of Nigeria compelled the country's writers to use some form of English, but standard imperial English was not long acceptable to patriotic Nigerians. So Nigeria must develop for its literature an English whose norms were created by Nigerians in response to the special circumstances in their country. Such an English (Nigerian Pidgin) existed at the time of independence, but because it was maligned, the first generation of Nigerian writers sought a more respectable English literary medium. Hence they devised the strategy of “transliteration”—introducing ethnic-language tropes and idioms into the English text. But transliteration was a flawed approach, and its literary output, in a language only marginally different from imperial English, remained inappropriate in Nigeria. Even so, the strategy served the desired goal by demystifying standard English. As a result, Nigerian Pidgin is coming into its own as a literary medium, and Nigerian writers are taking greater liberties in their reconstitution of English.

Abstract of “McKinley at Home” This paper examined early American cinema's role as a “visual newspaper” to assess the emerging medium's influence on the formation of a national public sphere. Focusing on early moving images of William McKinley, particularly a brief 1896 “front porch” campaign film showing the presidential candidate on his front lawn reading a telegram, I demonstrated how this recently introduced visual technology could be deployed to dislocate time and space for pointed political effect. This effect depended on how McKinley was depicted on-screen “at home” (simultaneously in Canton, Ohio, and in front of vaudeville houses across the country) and on how these images were initially exhibited and received (by cheering audiences packed with high-ranking Republican dignitaries). In both formal composition and reception, early cinema was instrumental in helping to blur traditional distinctions between personal presence and mass media representation, as well as between domestic life and public spectacle.

The Spanish-Cuban-American war of 1898 was one of the first wars in history to be filmed. Yet despite its participation in the birth of American cinema, the war disappeared as a subject from the later archives of filmmaking. No major films chronicle the three-month war in Cuba or the subsequent three-year war in the Philippines, although films have been made about virtually every other war in American history. My paper is about that duality, about the formative presence and telling absence of this pivotal war in the history of American film.

Who is, or are, Micheaux's Chesnutt(s)? Which of Charles Chesnutt's post-Reconstruction novels may Oscar Micheaux be said to have adapted in his films? To such seemingly obvious questions, there are some obvious answers. It is well known that Micheaux directed two film versions of Chesnutt's tragic novel of racial passing, The House behind the Cedars (1900): the first, in 1924, is entitled House behind the Cedars and is a faithful adaption that encountered difficulties with the censors; the second is the recently rediscovered Veiled Aristocrats (1932), a remake with a happy ending. It is less well known that around the same time, Micheaux may also have arranged to purchase the rights to Chesnutt's Marrow of Tradition (1901), a novel on the 1898 Wilmington, North Carolina, race “riot,” with a parallel plot on the struggles in an interracial family over the legitimacy of the mulatto side. It is not clear whether the transaction was ever completed or whether the Marrow film was ever made. But together the two novels may be said to map the conflicting contours of and historical changes in representations of racial passing—not only Chesnutt's but also Micheaux's. Both novelist and filmmaker chart the crossing of the classic passing plot of discovery and subsequent acknowledgment or denial of “black blood,” which shapes both Chesnutt's and Micheaux's House behind the Cedars, with narratives of legitimacy—legal, social, and professional—central to Marrow of Tradition. In the process, the novel and the film suggest how the traditional tropes of racial uplift that undergird the search for middle-class respectability, in a kind of updated passing plot, should be thought of as an available narrative form rather than a coherent ideology.