Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 68-06, Section: A, page: 2452.

Advisers: Wai Chee Dimock; Jennifer Jordan Baker.

This project develops a theory of nineteenth-century American literary history that accounts for the significant connections between authorship and other professions, including education, journalism, and oratory. It challenges the idea of American exceptionalism as it brings American literature back into conversation with other world cultures. By figuring American authorship as a form of cosmopolitan vocation, it removes writers in this period from the local business of literary production and places them within a larger framework of creative thought and political action. These studies of the literary and professional pursuits of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Margaret Fuller, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Frederick Douglass, and Walt Whitman demonstrate that writers made substantial contributions to the antebellum era's heated debates over slavery, immigration, and war.

These five authors combined their literary talents with their professional skills as they pursued innovative solutions to national problems of nativism, racism, and imperialism. For Longfellow, that meant teaching public courses on foreign literatures and translating works by European authors. Fuller responded to national crises by engineering transnational print conversations in her columns for the New-York Tribune, in which she kept Americans apprised of the European revolutions of 1848. As an abolitionist editor, Douglass exposed the history of American slavery to the world and called for transatlantic interference in national politics in order to build a racially integrated United States. Emerson stepped back from his early nationalist statements as he lectured with renewed vigor in the wake of the Fugitive Slave Law on the subject of national promises of liberty that had become mere hollow words. Whitman envisioned a process of national healing through poetry and used his journalistic skills to manage his transatlantic reception in order to secure his reputation as a representative American poet. When read in relation to and often in conflict with one another, these authors form a composite picture of an American literature vitally engaged with cultural work on several professional fronts. They all argue strongly for a new vision of the "American Renaissance" as a revolution born of international and interdisciplinary efforts to redraw the lines of global community.