The Corporation in the Nineteenth-Century American Imagination

The first study of the representation of corporations in US law, literature, and culture

• Covers key topics in company law including the emergence of corporate personhood, the regulation of monopolies, the piercing of the corporate veil, agent-principal relationships and examines their literary and cultural manifestations
• Presents interdisciplinary readings of legal, literary and visual texts, including legal treatises, caricatures, novels, and magazine publications
• Draws on literary texts including Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton’s The Squatter and the Don, James Fenimore Cooper’s The Bravo, Frank Norris’ The Octopus and Charles W. Chesnutt’s The Partners
• Draws on cases including Charles River Bridge v. Warren Bridge (1837), Munn v. The State of Illinois (1877) and Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad (1886)

This book examines the way the corporation – a legal concept of enduring and timely importance in the Anglo-American legal tradition – was imagined in the nineteenth century historical imagination.

Stefanie Mueller traces the ways in which literary and cultural representations of the corporation in nineteenth-century America helped shift how the corporation was envisioned; from a public tool meant to serve the common good, to an instrument of private enterprise. She explores how artists and writers together with lawyers and economists represented this transformation through narrative and metaphor. Drawing on a range of legal, literary and visual texts, she shows how the corporation’s public origins as well as its fundamentally collective nature continued to be relevant much longer than previous scholarship has argued.