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American Terror interrogates the origins, contexts, and significance of the distinctive tone of terror within a major strain of early and nineteenth-century American literature. Contrary to critical tendencies to literary terror as a rejection or contrary reaction to Enlightenment thought, this book draws upon new work in affect theory and the refreshed interest in American intellectual history to argue that American authors sought through it to produce the peculiar affect of scientific objectivity: the feeling of thinking. As what counts as knowledge comes to be aligned with a set of abstract universal rules and processes—the scientific method, propositional logic, geometric models of analysis—literary terror does not reject such progress as unfeeling, but rather sets out to describe it in feeling. Employing close reading in concert with original historical research, this book threads the story of terror’s relation to philosophy through three American writers who not only write terror, but write about terror. It begins with Jonathan Edwards’s theoretical defense of terror as a sensation of truth, develops through Edgar Allan Poe’s refinement of terror’s sensation of truth within an aesthetics of analytical methodology, and culminates in Herman Melville’s dramatization of the consequences exacted by this terrific perspective: a radically unknowable universe that everywhere refuses to relax its demands to be known. Through this critical repositioning of literary terror, American Terror charts how the dark strain of American literature carves a previously unaccounted for affective curve in the route of philosophy from Enlightenment idealism to poststructuralism.

This book explores the construction and emergence of “Bohemia” in American literature and culture. Simultaneously a literary trope, a cultural nexus, and a socio-economic landscape, la vie bohème traveled to the United States from the Parisian Latin Quarter in the 1850s. At first the province of small artistic coteries, Bohemia soon inspired a popular vogue, embodied in restaurants, clubs, neighborhoods, novels, poems, and dramatic performances across the country. This study follows la vie bohème from its earliest expressions in the U.S. until its explosion in Greenwich Village in the 1910s. Although Bohemia was everywhere in nineteenth- and twentieth-century American culture, it has received relatively little scholarly attention. This book fills this critical void, discovering and exploring the many textual and geographic spaces in which Bohemia was conjured. It not only provides access to a neglected cultural phenomenon, but also to a new and compelling way of charting the development of American literature and culture.

This book examines the crucial role of the illustrated press in the formation of the reading public and the writing profession during Henry James's lifetime. It re-examines James's stories, criticism, and travel essays in light of the explosive growth of the magazine industry in the United States and abroad at the turn of the century. Using previously unpublished archival sources, the book delves into James's negotiations with publishers, editors, and literary agents, as well as his interactions with some of the celebrated artists who were assigned to illustrate his work. Reproducing more than 120 illustrations, advertisements, and other images that accompanied James's work, this book reveals the vital interplay of word and image that helped define literary culture at a moment when “popular entertainment” and “high art” had not yet gone their separate ways.