Matthew Garrett, Stanford University
Barra Dissertation Fellow
mgarrett@stanford.edu
"Episodic Poetics in the Early Republic: The Politics of Writing in Parts, 1787-1830"
In the early U.S., the literary device of the episode -- that integral but also extractable narrative unit so often taken for granted by readers and critics -- played an important role in imaginatively mediating three problems of national formation. Between the constitutional consolidation of 1787-88 and the takeoff of the Jacksonian 1830s, representational politics confronted a stark division between ruling elites and masses, widely shared assumptions about social relationships and individual responsibilities met the newly robust market and its accomplice structures of privilege and exclusion, and the social and political transformations announced by the American and French Revolutions spurred attention to the nature of historical change. In ways both magisterial and mundane, an episodic literature gave shape to these developments. Through an examination of the field of literary production, from narrative form to the business of printing, this project explores the ideological causes and the cultural consequences of the literature of the episode in the early republic.
Barra Dissertation Fellow
mgarrett@stanford.edu
"Episodic Poetics in the Early Republic: The Politics of Writing in Parts, 1787-1830"
In the early U.S., the literary device of the episode -- that integral but also extractable narrative unit so often taken for granted by readers and critics -- played an important role in imaginatively mediating three problems of national formation. Between the constitutional consolidation of 1787-88 and the takeoff of the Jacksonian 1830s, representational politics confronted a stark division between ruling elites and masses, widely shared assumptions about social relationships and individual responsibilities met the newly robust market and its accomplice structures of privilege and exclusion, and the social and political transformations announced by the American and French Revolutions spurred attention to the nature of historical change. In ways both magisterial and mundane, an episodic literature gave shape to these developments. Through an examination of the field of literary production, from narrative form to the business of printing, this project explores the ideological causes and the cultural consequences of the literature of the episode in the early republic.