Roundtable on Radical Literature and the Political Horizons of C19

Roundtable on Radical Literature and the Political Horizons of C19 John Funchion, University of Miami, Chair Nathan Wolff, Tufts University John Mac Kilgore, Florida State University Sophia Forster, California Polytechnic... [ view full abstract ]

Roundtable on Radical Literature and the Political Horizons of C19

John Funchion, University of Miami, Chair

Nathan Wolff, Tufts University

John Mac Kilgore, Florida State University

Sophia Forster, California Polytechnic State University

J. Michelle Coghlan, University of Manchester

Kelley Kreitz, Pace University

Nathaniel Cadle, Florida International University

Against the backdrop of the reactionary climate of the 1950s, Walter Rideout wrote what remains one of the fullest treatments of the U.S. radical novel; however, Rideout begins his study in 1900, even though socialist novels of the early twentieth century extended the political and aesthetic work performed by nineteenth-century authors. Recent work by Russ Castronovo, Caleb Smith, Shelley Streeby, David Zimmerman, and members of this roundtable have begun to explore the radical dimensions of the nineteenth century. This roundtable interrogates Rideout’s characterization of committed literature as often didactic or artistically deficient, because it leaves us poorly equipped for describing the aesthetic contributions, differences, and nuances of the rich body of long nineteenth-century radical literature. While retaining Rideout's helpful definition of radical literature as that which "objects to the human suffering imposed by some socioeconomic system and advocates that the system be fundamentally changed," this roundtable will expand the category to tell a more complete story of its development and of the range of political possibilities that writers imagined in their poetry and prose. Each participant will provide a partial account of one of the many iterations of radical aesthetics, as well as of the political climates that nourished it, paying particular attention to the issues of intersectionality that Rideout and other scholars of his generation often downplayed by approaching radical art through the lens of solidarity (which tended to overemphasize the contributions of white men).

In keeping with C19’s efforts at encouraging alternative presentation formats, we seek to create space for as open and wide-ranging a dialogue as possible. For this reason, this roundtable includes six participants whose work collectively spans the long nineteenth century. Papers will be circulated in advance of the conference; attendees will have the option to request access to an online folder (either Dropbox or Google Drive), where they can download the papers. Participants will provide short, five-minute summations of their papers during the roundtable, and the chair will initiate the conversation by posing a couple of questions to the entire panel. This format will leave ample time for extended conversation among the roundtable participants and attendees. Information about the format and availability of papers will be communicated via the C19 listserv.

The roundtable begins with an overview -- and problematization -- of the accepted conceptual history of “radicalism” during the long nineteenth century. Nathan Wolff interrogates Ed Folsom’s claims about the radicalism of Walt Whitman’s Democratic Vistas (1871) by examining the taxonomy that informs Folsom’s and other scholars’ notion of radicalism. Echoing Edmund Burke’s attempt to distinguish radicalism from conservatism, Wolff argues, Americanist criticism often presumes a cognate opposition between radical democracy and corrupt institutions. Wolff instead posits an institutionalized form of radicalism that Whitman, Sutton Griggs, and other writers took seriously in order to account for the intensely affective involvement of U.S. citizens in official politics. Next, John Mac Kilgore traces the roots of American radical literature to responses to the perceived promises and failures of the American Revolution. Focusing on a utopian novel entitled Equality -- A Political Romance (1802), written by Scottish Jacobin émigré John Lithgow, Kilgore identifies disillusionment with the incrustation of caste and class in the aftermath of the revolution as a motivating factor for the use of romance as a form of political critique. Like later works by Edward Bellamy and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Equality proposes a cooperative society, wherein private property is abolished, as the ultimate promise and logical extension of the U.S. democratic experiment. Then, Sophia Forster recovers an important connection between domestic sentimental fiction and radical literature. Reading postbellum novels by Rebecca Harding Davis, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, and Louisa May Alcott within the context of the emerging labor reform movement, Forster shows how these novels dramatized industrial capitalism’s degradation of domestic life and anticipated the translation of labor reform rhetoric into Progressive-era strategies for enacting protective legislation for women workers. According to Forster, Davis, Phelps, and Alcott deployed gender essentialism to intervene in the prevailing capitalist ideology. J. Michelle Coghlan likewise proposes that U.S. labor history plays a central role in late-nineteenth-century American literature. Coghlan excavates what she calls American literature’s radical memory in two canonical texts. First, she demonstrates how Henry James’ The Princess Casamassima (1886) archives the radical memory culture of the Paris Commune. She then examines how Jack London’s The Iron Heel (1908) responds to the radical aesthetic modes used by African-American anarchist Lucy Parsons in her experimental biography of her Haymarket martyr husband, Albert Parsons. Next, Kelley Kreitz examines two Latinx literary magazines published in New York City at the end of the nineteenth century, La Revista Ilustrada de Nueva York and Las Tres Américas, as sites for recovering a radical community of Spanish-language writers, including José Martí and his circle. Kreitz explores these experimental publications’ use of the literary as a vehicle for promoting revolutionary visions of political independence in Cuba and Puerto Rico and imagining new alliances across class, gender, and racial divisions throughout the Americas. Although largely invisible to U.S. literary history, these periodicals contributed significantly to the diverse range of voices and heterogeneous array of ideas that constituted radical literature in the United States. Finally, Nathaniel Cadle examines the legacy of the nineteenth-century sentimental tradition in terms of its impact on twentieth-century leftist authors. Cadle reads Upton Sinclair’s deliberate use of sentimental conventions in The Jungle (1906) as a model for the proletarian fiction that emerged after the formation of the Communist Party USA in 1919. Sinclair’s recovery and radicalization of the sentimental form also anticipated Antonio Gramsci’s theoretical engagement with nineteenth-century sentimentalism following his rereading of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and other sentimental novels during his imprisonment.