The body of property : antebellum American fiction and the phenomenology of possession / Chad Luck.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Luck, Chad, author.

Series:

American Literatures Initiative

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

American fiction--19th century--History and criticism.

American fiction.

Material culture in literature.

American fiction--18th century--History and criticism.

Property in literature.

Personal belongings in literature.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (308 p.)

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

New York : Fordham University Press, 2014.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

What does it mean to own something? How does a thing become mine? Liberal philosophy since John Locke has championed the salutary effects of private property but has avoided the more difficult questions of property’s ontology. Chad Luck argues that antebellum American literature is obsessed with precisely these questions. Reading slave narratives, gothic romances, city-mystery novels, and a range of other property narratives, Luck unearths a wide-ranging literary effort to understand the nature of ownership, the phenomenology of possession. In these antebellum texts, ownership is not an abstract legal form but a lived relation, a dynamic of embodiment emerging within specific cultural spaces—a disputed frontier, a city agitated by class conflict. Luck challenges accounts that map property practice along a trajectory of abstraction and “virtualization.” The book also reorients recent Americanist work in emotion and affect by detailing a broader phenomenology of ownership, one extending beyond emotion to such sensory experiences as touch, taste, and vision. This productive blend of phenomenology and history uncovers deep-seated anxieties—and enthusiasms—about property across antebellum culture.

Contents:

Front matter

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Pierson v. Post and the Literary Origins of American Property

1. Walking the Property: Ownership, Space, and the Body in Motion in Edgar Huntly

2. Eating Dwelling Gagging: Hawthorne, Stoddard, and the Phenomenology of Possession

3. Anxieties of Ownership: Debt, Entitlement, and the Plantation Romance

14. Feeling at a Loss: Theft and Affect in George Lippard

Epilogue. Wisconsin, 2004: Racial Violence and the Bodies of Property

Notes

Works Cited

Index

Notes:

Includes index.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on print version record.

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

ISBN:

0-8232-6746-6

0-8232-6634-6

0-8232-6302-9

0-8232-6303-7

OCLC:

890533761