Counterfeit presentments: Fraud and the production of nineteenth-century American literature.

摘要

"Formerly every Thing printed was believed, because it was in Print; Now Things seem to be disbelieved for just the very same Reason," Benjamin Franklin observed at the end of the eighteenth century, and this dissertation argues that his complaint presciently registers a new era of print culture, in which literary production becomes indissociable from fraud. Critics tend to read the nineteenth century's print explosion as inaugurating either a new freedom of expression or the establishment of new disciplinary forms, but excavating this crisis of literary authority challenges such assessments by illuminating a contemporary idea of literature that understood it not as eminently functional, but as troublingly dysfunctional. The first chapter of the dissertation argues that while literary nationalism promised to fix a stable national imaginary amidst the exigencies of expansionism, it also generated anxieties that American literature amounted to nothing more than "one vast perambulating humbug," as Edgar Allan Poe declared. The second chapter, on the antebellum "puffing system," traces the period's celebrated print public sphere back to its origins in paid reviews, self-reviews, and strategic reprinting, in order to reveal how the rhetoric of democracy hinged on a kind of normative fraudulence. In chapter three, which examines the neglected genre of the false slave narrative, I consider the unpredictable conjunctions between fraud, authenticity, and race within antebellum literary culture, which both regulated the writing of former slaves and, on occasion, provided the means for writers to intervene in such representations. Finally, the fourth chapter, on the pseudonymous bestseller Fanny Fern, develops this double social function of fraud by arguing that as the language of artifice and imitation supervised the influx of women into the mid-century literary marketplace, Fern embraced such associations so forcefully as to splinter the disciplinary logic they initially sustained. By reading literature's growing institutionalization against episodes where its meanings threaten to miscarry, this dissertation seeks to reanimate nineteenth-century print culture, proposing that going into print does not always fix meanings but at times unsettles them by putting at issue representation itself.