Scales of identification: Geography, affect, and United States literature, 1803--1908

Scales of Identification considers the ways in which literary texts contributed to the production and reconfiguration of a wide array of spatial scales often associated with nineteenth-century genres like the domestic novel, the regional sketch, the urban detective story, and the national romance. By forging and at times critiquing relationships between characters, readers, and different kinds of places, literature plays a crucial affective role in the production of spatial scales---a process that cultural geographers like David Harvey and Neil Smith have recently drawn attention to.;The first section focuses on different "crises of scale" in Charles Brockden Brown's "Memoirs of Carwin," arguing that the text expresses anxieties about the possibility that national expansionism paradoxically threatened to undermine the very boundaries of the nation. The Gothic urban interiors of Edgar Allan Poe and Henry James involve a similar contradiction: for the cities that seemed to offer enclosed apartments increasingly depended on international flows of labor and commerce---which assume monstrous and horrifying forms in these authors' writings.;However, not all writers responded to emergent international relationships with horror: Chapters 3 and 4 turn to writers who reconfigured existing scales in response to new economic and technological situations. Herman Melville and Walt Whitman both imagine exuberantly global communities, but they do so by delving into the radically idiosyncratic voices of castaways and isolatos---by evoking a feeling of cosmopolitan despair that universalizes privation without acknowledging that privation was in fact being unevenly distributed throughout the world. Finally, literary and rhetorical regionalists ranging from Sarah Orne Jewett to Frank Norris and Booker T. Washington reframed regions by linking their very existence to changing international markets for commodities like Maine lumber, California wheat, and Southern cotton.