'A Nation At Risk': Personal injury and liability in American fiction

The explosion of tort litigation in the first quarter of the nineteenth century fundamentally redefined notions of causation, risk and liability. This study argues that the thematic and formal properties of many American novels are embedded in the conceptual universe at the center of tort law. Pairing landmark tort cases with literary texts, "A Nation at Risk" analyzes the American preoccupation with questions of causal proximity, moral blame and legal liability--questions I identify as constitutive of many American narratives. In particular, "A Nation at Risk" argues that the narrative reconstructions of risk or accident constitute a genre of accident narratives--a subgenre actually--that is distinctly visible within American fiction.; The study begins just at the moment at which a crucial transformation in the theory of liability becomes unmistakable. In an analysis of James Fenimore Cooper's The Pioneers (1823), Chapter 1 shows how the theory of liability known as negligence helped to negotiate the American transition from a wilderness to an industrial society. Chapter 2 focuses on the role of the bystander to an accident, and in an examination of the fiction of Stephen Crane, it raises the possibility that laws about bystanders played a part in nineteenth-century constructions of race.; Moving from the late nineteenth century into the twentieth, Chapter 3 traces changes in the risk-related issues of causation and forseeability which constitute essential elements of any negligence case. This chapter discusses the preoccupation with probability and the attenuation of causation in the case of Palsgraf v. Long Island R.R. Co. (1928), as well as in Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy (1925), Thornton Wilder's The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927), and John Dos Passos's U.S.A. trilogy (1930-1936). Finally, Chapter 4 investigates how the nature of liability has been reconfigured in the consumer age. Here I analyze the structure of "products liability," as well as Stephen King's fiction and Don DeLillo's White Noise (1984).