In light of police raids and de facto forms of censorship, Shelley Streeby has powerfully pointed to what she aptly terms “the limits of print as an archive of radical memory,” and, so too, the limits within American literary studies in so far recognizing the various and voluminous genres of nineteenth-century radical print culture – from fiery speeches and satirical strike songs to political pamphlets, worker song-poems, insurgent novels, and experimental biography – as literature. This chapter explores the ways American literature nevertheless archives radical movements and the ways nineteenth-century radicals engaged with and rethought the canon of American literature. It also considers how nineteenth-century US radicalism shaped American literature more broadly by turning to Henry James’s 1886 novel The Bostonians as an unexpectedly rich archive of radical abolition and its legacies.

Chapter two turns to Henry James’s supernatural classic, The Turn of the Screw (1898), to show the backlash of the literary intelligentsia against New Thought and the inner child. This chapter reads The Turn of the Screw as a critical response to Frances Hodgson Burnett’s Little Lord Fauntleroy that mocks the book’s saccharine portrayal of innocent children and its New Thought overtones. While siblings Miles and Flora initially resemble Lord Fauntleroy in their youth, beauty, and apparent innocence, their subsequent actions could not be more different. Whereas Burnett’s protagonist heals his grieving mother and depressed grandfather and brings them spiritual peace, Miles and Flora lead their governess to the brink of madness by consorting with evil spirits. James, who wrote so perceptively about the inner life of a child a year earlier in What Maisie Knew (1897), deliberately portrayed Miles and Flora as opaque, unsympathetic, and allied with dark forces. In so doing, he skewered New Thought's relentless idealization of children as conduits to God. He also paved the way for more recent depictions of evil children in horror fiction and in films such as The Bad Seed (1956), The Omen (1976), or We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011).