The Poetics Of Sovereignty In American Literature 1885 1910

The book examines trends in American literature and sheds new light on the legal history of race relations during the Progressive Era.

During the Progressive Era, the United States regularly suspended its own laws to regulate racialized populations. Judges and administrators relied on the rhetoric of sovereignty to justify such legal practices, while in American popular culture, sovereignty helped authors coin tropes that have become synonymous with American exceptionalism today. In this book, Andrew Hebard challenges the notion of sovereignty as a 'state of exception' in American jurisprudence and literature at the turn of the twentieth century. Hebard explores how literary trends such as romance and realism helped conventionalize, and thereby sanction, the federal government's use of sovereignty in a range of foreign and domestic policy matters, including the regulation of overseas colonies, immigration, Native American lands, and extra-legal violence in the American South. Weaving historiography with close readings of Mark Twain, the Western, and other hallmarks of Progressive Era literature, Hebard's study offers a new cultural context for understanding the legal history of race relations in the United States.

The book examines trends in American literature and sheds new light on the legal history of race relations during the Progressive Era.

Hobbes, Sovereignty and Early American Literature explores the development of ideas about sovereignty and democracy in the early United States. It looks at Puritan sermons and poetry, founding-era political debates and representations of revolutionary and anti-slavery violence to reveal how Americans imagined the elusive possibility of a democratic sovereignty.

Demonstrates that the quest for immediacy, or experiences of direct connection and presence, has propelled the development of American literature and media culture.

Based on the author's dissertation (doctoral)--Columbia University, 2013.

Shows how shifting views on race caused the American conservative movement to surrender highbrow fiction to to progressive liberals.

The Poetics of Insecurity explores how American literary writers forged a cultural imaginary in which insecurity acts as an enlivening force.