Fictions of Mass Democracy in Nineteenth-Century America examines how mass democracy was understood before public opinion could be measured by polls. It argues that fiction, in its freedom to represent what resists representation, develops the most groundbreaking theories of the democratic public. These literary accounts of democracy focus less on overt pubic action than the profound effects of everyday social encounters. This book thus departs from recent scholarship, which emphasizes the responsibilities of citizenship and the achievements of oppositional social movements. It demonstrates how novels and stories by Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Fanny Fern, Harriet Jacobs and James Fenimore Cooper attempt to understand a public organized not only by explicitly political discourse, but by informal and disorganized social networks.
This essay investigates an early instance of “network theory” in order to argue that such theories did not, as most scholars suggest, emerge exclusively in the digital age. Charles Brockden Brown's Arthur Mervyn (1799–1800) attempts to theorize the information networks of the early American republic by comparing the spread of information to the spread of yellow fever. Unlike other novels that focus on the spread of contagious disease (such as Dickens's Bleak House), Arthur Mervyn refuses to trace a clear path of transmission from person to person. Instead, the randomness of the fever's spread gives Brown a stark, dramatic way of visualizing the unpredictability built into all such chains of transmission. Rather than a mark of nostalgia for an earlier age of “face-to-face” communication, this interest in casual and ephemeral channels of communication (and indifference to print) is a mark of the text's modernity. What Brown recognizes in his analysis of emergent networks is the power of the city to reorder social connection, enabling individuals to bypass official sources of information, play a role in the process of transmission, and become (often unwitting) participants in a transformed public sphere. In Arthur Mervyn, the yellow fever epidemic works as a fantasy of exposure, an impossible kind of social transparency that ultimately serves as a map for comprehending the mysterious workings of a “connected age.”
A long-standing debate over Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn turns on the question of intention. While defenders of the novel say that Huck's change of heart toward Jim represents a critique of social conformity, recent detractors claim that the novel's celebration of this change of heart represents a form of liberal bad faith. This essay argues that both readings misunderstand the novel, which works not only to highlight Huck's good intentions but also to replace this sentimental model of responsibility with one drawn from the emergent law of negligence. Having effects rather than intentions be grounds of liability, this new legal paradigm made persons responsible for the inadvertent harms they caused others. From the perspective of negligence, Huckleberry Finn is an indictment of post-Reconstruction racism—not because it offers friendship as a model of reform but because it imagines accountability even in the absence of malice.
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