Melville's Maids and the Violence of the Gulf Stream
Andrew Kopec
Purdue U, Fort Wayne
Andrew Kopec is assistant professor of English at Purdue University Fort Wayne. His research on the intersections of literary and economic cultures has appeared (or is forthcoming) in PMLA, ELH: English Literary History, Early American Literature, ESQ, as well as other journals and edited volumes. He is completing a book manuscript, “Pacing Panic: American Romanticism and the Business Cycle,” which challenges the thesis of American Romanticism’s optimism by demonstrating how the era's imaginative writing theorized—and profited from—economic turbulence. For C19 2016, he organized a roundtable on “Unsettling Historicism,” which was favorably reviewed in ESQ’s “Year in Conferences.”
Abstract
This session explores five different approaches to "climate" as they inform intersecting subfields across Americanist scholarship. These presentations will be both informative and provocative. Our five panelists represent... [ view full abstract ]
This session explores five different approaches to "climate" as they inform intersecting subfields across Americanist scholarship. These presentations will be both informative and provocative. Our five panelists represent diverse approaches, and their 10-minute talks will cover some of the major changes in U.S. culture across the long nineteenth century: from emergent economic and climatological theories in the 1840s; to transhemispheric antebellum practices of--and debates about--labor, including (northern) factory and (Caribbean) plantation management; to influential media climates in the 1850s as constructed by popular periodicals; to the political climate during the Civil War, with a focus on Lincoln, treason, and the suspension of habeas corpus; and finally, to Reconstruction-era representations of "literal" climate as they speak to postwar concerns with region and difference.
This roundtable will explore the cultural functions and ramifications of these climates: how archipelagic island plantocracies led to the environmental wreckage of the salt industry in the Bermudian archipelago; how the emerging disciplines of political economy and climatology construed "volatility" as normative, and how writers like Herman Melville discerned and critiqued these "objective" discourses; how Robert E. Bonner cultivated a climate of celebrity for antebellum women poets published in the New York Ledger in a way that changed the media landscape; how Lincoln's vision of the political climate has been theorized by legal historians and cultural theorists in terms of a "state of war"; and finally, how metaphors of climate in postbellum poems represented and evaded the ruptures of Reconstruction
Authors
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Andrew Kopec
(Purdue U, Fort Wayne)
Topic Area
Panel
Session
P60 » Negotiating Climates (08:30 - Saturday, 24th March, Fiesta I-II)
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