Chapters in this book

1. Frontmatter I
2. Contents V
3. Introduction: The New American Studies VII
4. PART 1. Authors, Careers, and the Transitions between Phases of Culture
5. Franklin and the Letters of the Republic 3
6. The Death of the Lady (Novelist): Wharton's House of Mirth 24
7. PART 2. Historicization and the Politics of Culture within Classic Texts
8. Hawthorne's A-Morality of Compromise 43
9. Democratic Social Space: Whitman, Melville, and the Promise of American Transparency 70
10. Mark Twain and Homer Plessy 112
11. PART 3. How Rhetorics Emerge within Arrays of Texts
12. Sparing the Rod: Discipline and Fiction in Antebellum America 141
13. An American Tragedy, or the Promise of American Life 171
14. PART 4. Norms of Representation: The Fusion and Replacement of Rhetorics
15. Representing Grief: Emerson's "Experience" 201
16. Bodily Bonds: The Intersecting Rhetorics of Feminism and Abolition 228
17. "The Gentle Boy from the Dangerous Classes": Pederasty, Domesticity, and Capitalism in Horatio Alger 260
18. PART 5. Reading Images: The Civil War and the Reconstruction of Memory
19. Albums of War: On Reading Civil War Photographs 287
20. The Trope of a New Negro and the Reconstruction of the Image of the Black 319
21. "The Sword Became a Flashing Vision": D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation 346
22. CONTRIBUTORS 393
23. INDEX 395