Philadelphia Stories America's Literature of Race and Freedom

by Otter, Samuel

• ISBN13: 9780199970964
• ISBN10: 0199970963
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2013-02-01
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

InPhiladelphia Stories, Samuel Otter finds literary value, historical significance, and political urgency in a sequence of texts written in and about Philadelphia between the Constitution and the Civil War. Historians such as Gary B. Nash and Julie Winch have chronicled the distinctive social and political space of early national Philadelphia. Yet while individual writers such as Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Allan Poe, and George Lippard have been linked to Philadelphia, no sustained attempt has been made to understand these figures, and many others, as writing in a tradition tied to the city's history. The site of William Penn's "Holy Experiment" in religious toleration and representative government and of national Declaration and Constitution, near the border between slavery and freedom, Philadelphia was home to one of the largest and most influential "free" African American communities in the United States. The city was seen by residents and observers as the laboratory for a social experiment with international consequences. Philadelphia would be the stage on which racial character would be tested and a possible future for the United States after slavery would be played out. It would be the arena in which various residents would or would not demonstrate their capacities to participate in the nation's civic and political life. Otter argues that the Philadelphia "experiment" (the term used in the nineteenth-century) produced a largely unacknowledged literary tradition of peculiar forms and intensities, in which verbal performance and social behavior assumed the weight of race and nation.

Author Biography

Samuel Otter is Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of Melville's Anatomies and the coeditor, with Geoffrey Sanborn, of Melville and Aesthetics.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Philadelphia Stories, 1790-1860

Fever

Mathew Carey, Absalom Jones, Richard Allen, and the Color of Fever

Ministers and Criminals: Richard Allen, John Joyce, and Peter Matthias

Benjamin Rush's Heroic Interventions

Mathew Carey's Fugitive Philadelphians

Charles Brockden Brown's Experiments in Character

Manners

Hugh Henry Brackenridge, and the Irrepressible Teague

Edward W. Clay's "Life in Philadelphia"

"The Rage for Profiles": Silhouettes at Peale's Museum

Philadelphia Metempsychosis in Robert Montgomery Bird's Sheppard Lee"

The Peculiar Position of Our People": William Whipper and Debates in the Black Conventions

Disfranchisement and Appeal

Joseph Willson's Higher Classes of Colored Society in Philadelphia

Riot"Doomed to Destruction": The History of Pennsylvania Hall

The Portraiture of the City of Philadelphia, and Henry James's American Scene The Mysteries of the City: George Lippard, Edgar Allan Poe

The Fiction of Riot: George Lippard, John Beauchamp Jones

The Condition of the Free People of Color

Freedom

The Struggle over "Philadelphia": Mary Howard Schoolcraft, Sara Josepha

Hale, Martin Robison Delany, James McCune Smith, and William Whipper

Frank J. Webb's The Garies and Their Friends

"A Rather Curious Protest"

Still Life in Georgia

History and Farce

Parlor and Riot

Philadelphia Vanitas

The Social Experiment in Herman Melville's Benito Cereno

CODA: John Edgar Wideman's Philadelphia

Bibliography

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