Distinctions are most zealously produced in theory where they least exist in fact. This axiom is a crucial aspect of the concept of abjection as it is used by theorists of white male hysteria. Julia Kristeva writes that, for the abject, “‘unconscious’ contents remain… excluded but in a strange fashion.” They remain excluded to a degree that “a defensive position [can] be established, [but] not radically enough to allow for a secure differentiation between subject and object” (7). In particular, it is the presence of the other with the self around which the often hysteric dance of exclusion takes place. Kristeva writes, “I abject myself within the same motion through which T claim to establish myself” (3).

In the antebellum period, gendered ideologies of anger made it difficult, if not impossible, for many women to acknowledge that their feelings of disappointment were masking their feelings of anger. Instructed that domesticity was their highest calling, their sole reason for being, more often than not, revolutionary white daughters were disappointed when they encountered its constrictions. “In education, in marriage, in religion, in everything, disappointment is the lot of woman,” Lucy Stone, one such daughter, declared. “From the first years to which my memory stretches, I have been a disappointed woman. When, with my brothers, I reached forth after the sources of knowledge, I was reproved with ‘It isn't fit for you; it doesn't belong to women.’… I was disappointed when I came to seek a profession worthy an immortal being — every employment was closed to me, except those of the teacher, the seamstress, and the housekeeper” (Schneir, 106–109).

This essay explores the ways that professions seek to claim social distinction by investing particular ways of knowing with moral authority. Through close analysis of popular representations of merchants in conduct books, business manuals, periodicals such as Hunt's Merchant's Magazine, and biographical sketches, it describes a pervasive campaign to define business as a form of mental work. Representing the marketplace as a distinctively American school for character, merchants and their advocates sought to appropriate the moral authority traditionally associated with the learned professions of the ministry, the law, and medicine. Developing a critique of elitist pedagogy based on solitary reading, this campaign sought to identity expert knowledge with the practical experience of business. Redefining the relation between study and professional authority, the rhetoric of business helped to alter the symbolic value of education and to transform the nature of ethical reflection for liberal capitalism.

Reporting on the Roman revolution of 1848 as the foreign correspondent of the New-York Daily Tribune, Margaret Fuller observed that Americans used the same arguments against the political emancipation of Italy that they employed against the social emancipation of blacks in the United States. “Americans in Italy,” she wrote, “talk about the corrupt and degenerate state of Italy as they do about that of our slaves at home.” “They come ready trained,” she explained, “to that mode of reasoning which affirms that, because men are degraded by bad institutions, they are not fit for better.” This essay builds upon Fuller's comment. It examines American accounts of the Italians' mid-19th-century struggle to free their country from its colonial bond to the Austrian empire and substitute local absolutist monarchies with more enlightened forms of government, and demonstrates that the discourse on revolutionary Italy became the site of a reenactment on foreign grounds of the domestic controversy over slavery. The discussion on whether Italians could become republican subjects was liable to become a mediated debate over emancipation and the future of the African bondsmen in the American republic because of the alleged similarities, both historical and “racial,” between the populations of Italy and blacks in antebellum America. Like the slaves in the United States, Italians had been subjected to brutal despotism for centuries, which, within the 19th-century environmental conception of political virtue, was believed to have negatively affected their aptitude for freedom. Like the black slaves, moreover, Italians were placed by racist ideology outside the pale of the dominant Anglo-Saxon racial category, a political as well as a “biological” class marked by the exclusive capacity for self-government.

In one of the brief reflections Walter Benjamin composed as part of his Arcades Project, he personified the mid-19th-century domestic interior and made it and the flaneur onfidantes: “The space winks at the flaneur: What do you think may have gone on here?” (418–19). Benjamin typically filtered much of his thought through the figure of the flaneur, a recognizable urban type that emerged during the middle third of the 19th century, one who deliberately strolled the city streets and arcades and attempted to discern the meanings of what he observed. In the fullest scholarly treatment of the subject, Anke Gleber argued that the act of walking formed an essential part of the flaneur's observational process. Discussing such works as E. T. A. Hoffman's “The Cousin's Corner-Window,” however, Gleber did acknowledge a “paradoxical variant,” the stationary flaneur (13).

Near the end of Ann Sophia Stephens's Malaeska (1839), a young woman argues with her fiancé, William, about whether he will agree to meet an American Indian woman whom she has befriended. He proclaims with “a smile of haughty contempt” that he has “never held equal communion with a colored race” (263). Sarah heatedly responds, “I have no predilection for savages as a race…may I not be allowed a favorite: especially as she is a white in education, feeling, everything but color?” (264). In this significant exchange, William and Sarah's statements encapsulate two 19th-century responses to the possibility of cross-racial contact. Although the characters perceive themselves to be arguing with each other — William rejects the possibility of such relationships outright even as Sarah forcefully argues for her right to have a friendship with the racial “other” — the modern reader must be struck by the fact that both characters are enmeshed in the same hierarchy of race that premises whiteness as a superior identity. While Sarah argues for a logic of identification based in culture and affect, her desire to be allowed a “favorite” is no less rooted in racialist discourses than is William's. Stephens's gendering of these apparently contrary but essentially similar responses is the topic of this essay.

Since 1972, the year that Tillie Olsen and the Feminist Press resurrected it, Rebecca Harding Davis's Life in the Iron Mills, which presents the tragic circumstances of the life of a Welsh furnace tender, has primarily been discussed in terms of it being an unjustly forgotten forerunner of such realist fiction of the later decades of the 19th century as Frank Norris's McTeague (1899) and Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie (1900). With its portrait of the “tragic realities of the immigrant poor, the cynicism of factory owners, [and] the brutality of working class life,” it has been widely praised for being “the earliest notable experiment of American realism,” for exemplifying a literary theory of the commonplace two decades prior to William Dean Howells's better-known theory of the same, and for dramatizing the “socioeconomic implications of environmental determinism” several years prior to Émile Zola's naturalism.

May Alcott's identity as an artist is overshadowed by, and often confused with, that of the author Louisa May Alcott. Born in Concord, Massachusetts, in 1840, Abbie May Alcott [later Nieriker], was the youngest of the Alcott sisters. Her capricious nature and artistic aspirations served as the inspiration for the character of Amy, the “little Raphael” of the March family, in Louisa's first popular novel, Little Women. Amy's desire to “go to Rome, and do fine pictures, and be the best artist in the whole world” (Alcott, quoted in Bedell, 248) was the embodiment of May Alcott's own fervent childhood dream of becoming a successful artist.

In 1853, Harriet Beecher Stowe filed a copyright suit against F. W. Thomas, a Philadelphia printer who had published an unauthorized German translation of Uncle Tom's Cabin in his newspaper, Die Freie Presse. Stowe brought suit in the federal circuit court in Philadelphia, thus ironically placing her claim in the hands of Justice Robert Grier, a notable enforcer of slaver-owners' interests under the Fugitive Slave Law. Grier found that Stowe's property rights in her novelistic plea for resistance to the Fugitive Slave Law were very narrow and that she could not prevent Thomas from publishing a translation without her authorization. In the conclusion to the court's opinion, Grier wrote,

Beginning in 1871 and continuing through 1876 Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass contained a small cluster of poems entitled “Bathed in War's Perfume” that had not appeared in any of the previous four editions and that would disappear from Whitman's final and definitive edition of Leaves in 1881. Taking the American flag as their focus, five of the seven poems in the group had emerged in Whitman's 1865–66 collection of war verse Drum-Taps and Sequel to Drum-Taps. This essay examines the issue of why Whitman created this cluster during the Reconstruction years only to disassemble it in 1881, and it also investigates the idea of the flag itself in Whitman's war and Reconstruction poetry. What did the flag mean to Whitman during those significant years of change in his own, and the nation's, life?

Revolution and law are joined in Billy Budd — and were from its inception. According to the Genetic Text editors, Herman Melville's last work began as a headnote to a ballad about a condemned naval mutineer. Gradually, this kernel evolved into a prose narrative set in 1797, the year of seemingly contagious British naval mutinies — notably Spithead and “The Great Mutiny” at the Nore — that threatened the prosecution of England's naval war against the regicidal French revolutionary forces. By the time Melville had fixed upon these emblematic, modern political events for his scene, the mutineer of the ballad, an older and probably guilty man, had become a very different figure (Hayford and Sealts, 2). Billy Budd's extraordinary qualities now speak to the injustice of his capital sentence, whereas Captain Vere's judgment speaks to the imperative of necessity. This conflict is reflected not only in the doubts of the drumhead court that sentences Billy, but in the arguments of generations of critics and the midrash of commentary the novel has engendered.

“Inever shall forget my thrill at the phrase cover it,” the Pulitzer Prize-winning author Zona Gale wrote of her early newspaper work in New York City from 1901 to 1903: “When I was actually a reporter, I used to go about my work saying to myself, ‘I'm out on an assignment!’ People talked about the newspaper grind. But I was more than happy in it. I was ecstatic.”

Willa Cather's description of Blind d'Arnault, the black pianoplaying prodigy in My Ántonia (1918), is shocking. “He had the Negro head,” Cather's narrator, Jim Burden, tells us, “almost no head at all; nothing behind the ears but folds of neck under close-clipped wool” (139). This passage, like the entire Blind d'Arnault episode, has usually been ignored by critics, or, in a few more recent instances, confronted as evidence of Willa Cather's racism. Jim's phrase of “astounding insult and innocence,” Blanche Gelfant writes, “assures him that the black man should not frighten, being an incomplete creature, possessed … of instinct and rhythm but deprived of intellect” (120). Elizabeth Ammons cites this passage too, among others, as one of many offensive racist stereotypes in the description of d'Arnault (“African American Art,” 57). The description of d'Arnault is certainly full of racist stereotypes: d'Arnault, with what are termed his “animal desires” and “dark mind,” playing “barbarously and wonderfully” (My Ántonia, 142), is hardly accorded a fully human status by Jim, and nothing in the novel suggests any distance between Jim's racial attitudes and Cather's. I do want to argue, though, that Cather's views on race are considerably more complicated, as well as more central to her fiction, than critics have yet demonstrated. Attending to the preoccupation with skull shape in Cather's fiction gives us a way into this complexity.

It is generally acknowledged that the International Exhibition of Modern Art of 1913, often called the Armory Show, was a masterpiece of public relations. In New York City, where it first opened, the newspapers were filled with articles on the exhibition, the elevated train stations were plastered with posters announcing it, uniformed attendants were stationed outside the Armory with megaphones to summon automobiles and taxis, thousands of lapel pins were handed out to the visitors, catalogues, pamphlets, magazines, and post cards were available for purchase, and a temporary U.S. Post Office was even provided on the premises from which to mail them.

On May 21, 1927, at 10:24 p.m., Charles Lindbergh gently touched down on French soil, the first person to fly the Atlantic alone. Immediately, the world had a new hero — mobbed wherever he went, the recipient of thousands of letters and poems, the inspiration for popular as well as classical music. But what, exactly, Lindbergh meant to his generation and subsequent generations has remained a source of interest and controversy. In “The Meaning of Lindbergh's Flight” (1958), for example, John W. Ward argued that Lindbergh revealed a deep tension in the American public: “Was the flight the achievement of a heroic, solitary, unaided individual or did the flight represent the triumph of the machine, the success of an industrially organized society?” Twenty-two years later, Laurence Goldstein, in “Lindbergh in 1927: The Response of Poets to the Poem of Fact” (1980), was less certain how to know the significance of Lindbergh's transatlantic flight. But he did argue that Lindbergh's problematic relationship to the “idealizing tendency of popular discourse” was itself a way to understand his complex response to his times and his achievement. More recently, Susan M. Gray, in Charles Lindbergh and the American Dilemma: The Conflict of Technology and Human Values (1988), argued that Lindbergh is best understood as a case study of a larger American issue, the “dialectical tension between technology and human values.” Not only did Lindbergh reveal the complex tensions noted by Ward and Goldstein, but, more fundamentally, he revealed the dialectical imagination characteristic of American thinking since the early 19th century.

Two of 20th-century American literature's most naive murderers, Clyde Griffiths and Bigger Thomas, also happen to be avid moviegoers. This may not be as coincidental as it first appears. In 1933 — roughly halfway between the publication dates of An American Tragedy (1925) and Native Son (1940) — a number of sociological studies conducted at the University of Chicago claimed that there was a demonstrable link between watching movies and committing crimes. Indeed, these so-called Payne Fund studies set out to prove that watching too many movies could lead directly to criminal behavior. In light of such studies, the influence of movies on Clyde Griffiths and Bigger Thomas seems far from incidental. At the least, An American Tragedy and Native Son suggest that the cultural ascendance of movies during the 1920s and 1930s was accompanied by widespread unease about the supposedly pernicious affects of moving pictures. The fact that both Clyde and Bigger become murderers after a healthy dose of movies suggests that Theodore Dreiser and Richard Wright were persuaded by the conclusion of University of Chicago sociologists that there was a link between “moving pictures and criminal conduct” (the title of one study). Yet Dreiser and Wright also perceived the way criminals were becoming celebrities through excessive media attention to their crimes and punishments. An American Tragedy and Native Son thus attest to the ways in which moving pictures and crime reporting conspired to produce a new discourse of spectacular criminality in modern America.

The matrix of ideas and questions that inform scholarship on the Harlem Renaissance as remained fairly consistent across several generations. For example, among the more commonly asked questions over the years have been: Was the Harlem Renaissance modernist or even modern in worldview or artistic form? Did it signal in any real sense the rebirth of a people or was it simply the invention of an intellectual elite with a naive faith in the transformative power of art? What was the relation of the Harlem Renaissance to American cultural and racial ideology? To what extent can we think of it as chronologically or geographically determined, that is, did it begin and end in Harlem in he 1920s? What is the role in this renaissance of an enlightened consciousness about Africa, its people, its art, and its culture? To what degree can we regard the Harlem Renaissance as symptomatic of an emergent black nationalism or move toward cultural separatism within America or the African diaspora? What are we to make of the interracial dynamics within the Harlem Renaissance? How are we to understand the problematic fascination with primitivism and folk culture that preoccupied not only participants in the Harlem Renaissance but also many of its subsequent critics? How did the Harlem Renaissance expand our notions of black subjectivity and identity? What was its relation to the sociopolitical agendas of the early 20th century? And, finally, did it succeed or did it fail? This list is by no means exhaustive, but in the decades that

During New York City's newly opened Museum of Modern Art's (MoMA's) fourth exhibition season of 1932–33, while director and intellectual leader Alfred H. Barr, Jr. was on sabbatical leave in Europe, interim director Holger Cahill mounted a show of 18th- and 19th-century American arts and crafts. Offered for sale in New England as antiques at the time of the show, the items on display in Cahill's American Folk Art: The Art of the Common Man in America 1750–1900 obscured the divisions between the avant-garde and the traditional, between high art and the everyday object. In an exhibit of items not easily categorized as modern nor properly considered art, MoMA admitted such local antiques and curiosities as weather vanes and amateur paintings into spaces otherwise reserved for the likes of Cézanne and Picasso.

Routinely represented by the mushroom cloud that arose from the city immediately subsequent to the atomic attack, Hiroshima has a central place in America's collective memory; it is, to borrow historian Pierre Nora's pregnant phrase, an American lieu de mémoire. In the American psyche, Hiroshima is not a place; it is an event of a special kind, one that is “immediately invested with symbolic significance” (Nora, 18). Even as the attack unfolded, even as the bomb left the bomb-bay doors, Hiroshima was “being commemorated in advance,” an event that was transformed, as it occurred, into a denning moment in national identity (18). Did the mushroom cloud mark an American triumph, the last act in the drama of World War II, or did it mask the inception of a new era for which America must take prime responsibility, an era of nuclear terror?

The American Century began in 1945. In the Cold War national narrative that arose in the United States after World War II, America was the hero of the world, a glorious empire called to victory in the war and destined to help others along the road to the American Dream. This narrative advanced a tropology that anchored the construction of the United States as culturally supreme and morally preeminent. It was a nationalistic, self-congratulating celebration — and in the midst of it Howard Fast appeared, the ultimate “Party” crasher.