| In this dissertation I examine the intersections of literature and photographic invention and practice from before the 1839 announcement of the daguerreotype to the literary moment of the American Renaissance in the 1850s, when daguerreotypes were succeeded by new imaging technologies. I argue that early writers in America were preoccupied with the component parts of what would eventually become photography and note authorial efforts to adapt facets of photographic representation to literary projects once the new art and science arrived on the scene. I foreground the role and relevance of photographic practitioners in hopes of providing a clearer understanding of the scientific search for photography, its close associations with literary invention, and to highlight the determining influence of the artist behind the lens for the details recorded and inscribed into public memory. I suggest photography was used as a model and a tool, seized upon by United States authors, for constructing and sometimes corrupting identity, and emphasize the coordinate promise of regeneration and the pitfalls of social degeneration inherent in the new mechanical image making, as well as the presence of that promise and pitfall within literary texts informed by photographic technology and practice.;I examine pre-1839 literary texts and authors to suggest a scattering of ideas for a kind of proto-photography that preceded its material appearance and was registered in desire, increasingly visible in literary production, as 1839 approaches. Prominent in this discussion are the science writings of Jonathan Edwards and Benjamin Franklin, the fiction of Charles Brockden Brown, the varied writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, and a little-discussed Nathaniel Hawthorne tale from the eve of photographic invention. In extended discussions of Hawthorne's daguerrean-era story "The Birth-mark" and daguerrean-era novel The House of the Seven Gables, I suggest the author's anxiety regarding the vexed nature of photographic truth and the contested meanings of photographic representation. I examine the height of daguerrean-era influence on literature by linking the writings and photography of entrepreneur John Plumbe, Jr., who played a crucial role in early daguerreotypy's reception and maturation in America, with Walt Whitman's poetics and the self-management of Whitman's own photographic iconography. Whitman appropriated and exploited the realistic pretenses of the new art of photography for use in his own poetry, so much so that a controlled image making from the mechanical eye is at the core of the seemingly organic entity Leaves of Grass. Ultimately, I suggest how the two artists' work commented, in related fashion, upon the critical issue of race in a country edging inevitably toward civil war. I use Plumbe as a means of reading Whitman's poetry and self-promotion, ultimately, telling two stories---one which recommends a little known nineteenth-century photographer and writer as a figure worthy of closer study in his own right, and the other, an illustration of a leading American writer responding to and incorporating photographic technology into his own imaginative literature. In the end, photography serves as a model and vehicle for literary production, and as a repository of desire for a transparent art form. Photographic technologies offered authors models of regenerative and degenerative power for national and individual identity and a metaphor for stabilizing a national literary project in search of self-definition. |
