Browsing by Author "Levander, Caroline"

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    Democratic Demographics: A Literary Genealogy of American Sustainability
    (2016-04-20) Goode, Abby L.; Levander, Caroline
    “Democratic Demographics” charts an American literary history of sustainability. It argues that sustainability, often considered a contemporary and global concept, comes from an early American ideal of agricultural plenty, epitomized in the agrarian writing of Thomas Jefferson and J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur. As U.S. writers developed and reshaped this ideal throughout the nineteenth century, they conceived of sustainability as the ability to feed and breed a racially homogeneous, American farming population. Spanning from 1773 to 1920, “Democratic Demographics” traces this racial and eugenic notion of sustainability across familial romances, gothic novels, black nationalist tracts, global poetry, and feminist utopias. From Herman Melville’s ghost-written agricultural report to Walt Whitman’s poems of crop renewal, these texts portray racial improvement and eugenic breeding as the key to agricultural and demographic abundance. Exposing the American literary roots of global population discourses, “Democratic Demographics” identifies an early, racial notion of sustainability that persists from Jefferson’s agrarianism to Theodore Roosevelt’s conservationism. Democratic Demographics” traces the transformation of American sustainability into a global ideal. It shows how writers imagined racially perfected, sustainable “American” societies beyond U.S borders—in spaces such as the West Indies, the Suez Canal, and the heart of the Amazon. Exposing the racial and reproductive underpinnings of U.S agrarianism, the first two chapters examine inversions of Jefferson’s small farming ideal in Herman Melville’s Pierre (1852) and Leonora Sansay’s Secret History (1808)—dystopian novels that portray overpopulation through racial and sexual degeneracy. Expanding agrarianism’s geographical scope, chapter three analyzes the black nationalist writings of Martin Delany and Sutton Griggs, as they envision all-black utopias on the eastern coast of Africa and the Texas borderlands. Following this geographically expansive trend, chapter four traces Walt Whitman’s development of eugenic agrarianism—a discourse that adapts American sustainability to a global context. The final chapter reveals how Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s feminist utopian novels regenerate a sustainable America in a eugenic, all-female utopia that escapes a crowded globe. “Democratic Demographics” thus uncovers sustainability’s legacy as a racially complex and geographically portable “New World” agrarian ideal—one that writers forged long before the 1987 UN Brundtland Report defined sustainability.
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    Sacred Dominion: Anti-Catholicism and the Romance of U.S. Imperialism, 1820-1900
    (2015-04-23) Seglie, AnaMaria T.; Levander, Caroline; Waligora-Davis, Nicole; Kripal, Jeffrey
    “Sacred Dominion” argues that anti-Catholicism fundamentally shaped the development of U.S. imperialism. While current scholarship on nineteenth-century U.S. geopolitics tends to examine imperialism in terms of race, class, and gender, “Sacred Dominion” is among the first literary studies to take seriously religion’s crucial impact on U.S. empire-building. It argues that U.S. romance writers played a pivotal role in forging the alliance between anti-Catholicism and U.S. empire. Their works position westward and overseas expansion as safeguards against Catholic tyranny and anarchy. From the novels of Nathaniel Hawthorne to the regional writing of George Washington Cable, this project demonstrates how romance writing constructed a dynamic partnership between Protestantism and U.S. geopolitics that continues to drive American foreign policy today. “Sacred Dominion” examines subgenres of romance to show how American writers relied on anti-Catholicism to imagine, justify, and contest U.S. imperialism. Beginning with those years long associated with the rise of Manifest Destiny and American Romanticism, this project illustrates how the alliance between anti-Catholicism and expansion underwrites antebellum works of romance such as George Lippard’s serials, Washington Irving’s histories, and even the novels of Hawthorne, an author whose obsession with Catholicism left an imprint on romances like The Scarlet Letter, not to mention his daughter Rose – a Catholic convert and nun. “Sacred Dominion” then charts the persistence of this romance tradition in the postbellum era. Turning to the work of a writer who made Mark Twain hate “all religions,” I examine George Washington Cable’s regional writing to demonstrate how anti-Catholicism mediated anxieties about the integration of religious and racial difference both at home and from abroad. The manuscript ends at the turn of the twentieth century with the work of Henry James and José Martí, illustrating how the early geopolitical foundations established through nineteenth-century romance set the tone for twentieth-century conceptions of U.S. internationalism. Tracing this romantic tradition across the eighty-year period when American literature emerged as a national canon and the U.S. emerged as an imperial nation, “Sacred Dominion” demonstrates how U.S. geopolitics and American romance were mutually invested in the nation’s Protestant origins and global future.
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    Savage Arcadia: The American Romance in The Anthropocene
    (2019-04-16) Carson, Joseph Thomas; Levander, Caroline
    “Savage Arcadia: The American Romance in the Anthropocene” posits American writers of the romance have been writing about what we now call the Anthropocene, the geological epoch in which human activity becomes geographically and environmentally measurable and irreversible, for over 200 years. From the American Renaissance, with figures such as Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville, to early 20th century writers such as Charles Chesnutt and William Faulkner, “Savage Arcadia” traces a persistent yet evolving recognition of environmental change, and it is through this persistent engagement with environmental transformation that the American romance novel traces the passage of time while exploring futurity and finality. As a literary history of climate change, “Savage Arcadia” reveals the dynamism between American romance and the Anthropocene. Yoking the romance and the Anthropocene, “Savage Arcadia” illuminates the pernicious resurgence of romanticism in moments of economic, national and environmental crisis. Whereas American literary criticism rehearses the familiar story of the limitations of romance and its detachment from reality, this project returns to the romance with the critical tools of ecocriticism and posthumanism, thereby revealing the romance as a genre where materiality and the environment are as important as the human elements. Tracing environmental destruction across the 19th and early 20th centuries, “Savage Arcadia” pays sustained attention to one of the most iconic features of our romantic landscape, the tree, and reads figures of the tree and its associated forms (boards, timber and deforestation) as symptoms of authors’ evolving recognition of the impact of environmental change over time. With particular attention to African American labor in the South, my project draws on the Anthropocene as an ecological reading practice to reshape the critical landscape and historical narratives of Emancipation, Reconstruction and Jim Crow. In turn, these critical archives of labor and race reveal the theoretical limitations of contemporary theories of the Anthropocene.