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Division and Imagined Unity in the American Renaissance

The Seamless Whole

Shawn Thomson

In examining the era’s multivalent tropes of seams and seamlessness, Thomson provides an innovative understanding of the interplay between division and unity in the thought, culture, and literature of the American Renaissance. New insights are offered on works by major authors such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Frederick Douglass, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson, Henry David Thoreau, Solomon Northup, Harriet Jacobs, and Elizabeth Stoddard, along with marginal figures. Thomson expands the canon by recovering the unknown authors Charles Edward Anthon and John S. Sauzade and recognizing their works as vital to the American Renaissance.
Taking the 1844 display of the Holy Tunic at the Cathedral of Treves as its point of departure, Thomson sheds light on the controversy of the seamless garment in the New England press and explores its transmutation in Anthon’s Pilgrimage to Treves, Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Dickinson’s poetry, and Melville’s major novels. In excavating seamlessness as a cultural artifact of the American Renaissance, Thomson pursues a cultural studies approach to the fabric of antebellum life. Thomson reads the seams of material culture to reveal the meaning of the dressing gown and the keepsake in Dickinson’s and Stoddard’s lives and letters. Thomson positions Sauzade’s Dickensian novel The Spuytenduyvel Chronicle as one of the first great works of the American metropolis and explores the spiritual-material dichotomy of the slave narratives of Douglass, Jacobs, and Northup. This book further reassesses the bitter literary rivalry between Melville and George Washington Peck, re-conceptualizes Melville the author through his relationship to the divided nation, and illuminates his failed idealism as a literary artist in Pierre. Thomson’s approach to the interrelationship of material culture, technology, and the modes of literary production creates a new sense of the American Renaissance as a paradoxical seamless whole wherein its seams are exposed for all to see.

University Press Copublishing Division / Fairleigh Dickinson University Press

Pages: 308 • Trim: 6¼ x 9¼

978-1-68393-109-6 • Hardback • November 2017 • $136.00 • (£105.00)

978-1-68393-110-2 • eBook • November 2017 • $129.00 • (£99.00)

Subjects: History / United States / General, History / United States / 19th Century, Literary Collections / American / General

Division and Imagined Unity in the American Renaissance

The Seamless Whole

Hardback

eBook

Summary

In examining the era’s multivalent tropes of seams and seamlessness, Thomson provides an innovative understanding of the interplay between division and unity in the thought, culture, and literature of the American Renaissance. New insights are offered on works by major authors such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Frederick Douglass, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson, Henry David Thoreau, Solomon Northup, Harriet Jacobs, and Elizabeth Stoddard, along with marginal figures. Thomson expands the canon by recovering the unknown authors Charles Edward Anthon and John S. Sauzade and recognizing their works as vital to the American Renaissance.
Taking the 1844 display of the Holy Tunic at the Cathedral of Treves as its point of departure, Thomson sheds light on the controversy of the seamless garment in the New England press and explores its transmutation in Anthon’s Pilgrimage to Treves, Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Dickinson’s poetry, and Melville’s major novels. In excavating seamlessness as a cultural artifact of the American Renaissance, Thomson pursues a cultural studies approach to the fabric of antebellum life. Thomson reads the seams of material culture to reveal the meaning of the dressing gown and the keepsake in Dickinson’s and Stoddard’s lives and letters. Thomson positions Sauzade’s Dickensian novel The Spuytenduyvel Chronicle as one of the first great works of the American metropolis and explores the spiritual-material dichotomy of the slave narratives of Douglass, Jacobs, and Northup. This book further reassesses the bitter literary rivalry between Melville and George Washington Peck, re-conceptualizes Melville the author through his relationship to the divided nation, and illuminates his failed idealism as a literary artist in Pierre. Thomson’s approach to the interrelationship of material culture, technology, and the modes of literary production creates a new sense of the American Renaissance as a paradoxical seamless whole wherein its seams are exposed for all to see.

Details

University Press Copublishing Division / Fairleigh Dickinson University Press

Pages: 308 • Trim: 6¼ x 9¼

978-1-68393-109-6 • Hardback • November 2017 • $136.00 • (£105.00)

978-1-68393-110-2 • eBook • November 2017 • $129.00 • (£99.00)

Subjects: History / United States / General, History / United States / 19th Century, Literary Collections / American / General

Author

Shawn Thomson is associate professor in the Department of Literatures and Cultural Studies at the University of Texas, Rio Grande Valley.

Table of Contents

Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Seams and Seamlessness in Antebellum America
Chapter 1: Christ’s Seamless Robe and the Material-Spiritual Duality in the American Renaissance
Chapter 2: Seam by Seam: Emily Dickinson’s Seamless Theory of Mind
Chapter 3: The Seamless Web of John S. Sauzade’s The Spuytenduyvel Chronicle
Chapter 4: Three Literary Men: The Intertwined Lives of Herman Melville, George Washington Peck, and John S. Sauzade
Chapter 5: The Seamless Whole: National Fictions in Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851), Pierre (1852),and The Confidence-Man (1857)
Chapter 6: Melville’s Unraveling in the Angelicalness of PierreEpilogue: Loomings of Futurity in the Seams of Don Delillo’s White Noise
Works Cited
Index
About the Author

Division and Imagined Unity in the American Renaissance

The Seamless Whole

Shawn Thomson

Division and Imagined Unity in the American Renaissance

The Seamless Whole

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