American Fragments: The Political Aesthetic of Unfinished Forms in the Early Republic

In the years between the independence of the colonies from Britain and the start of the Jacksonian age, American readers consumed an enormous number of literary texts called fragments. American Fragments argues that the literary fragment was used as a means of representing individuals who did not fit neatly into the social fabric of the nation, such as beggars, prostitutes, veterans, and other ostracized figures. It explores the relationship between aesthetic and national realities, and how fictionalized versions of their life stories influenced the sociopolitical circumstances of the emergent nation.

Format: Hardback
Length: 288 pages
Publication date: 03 May 2022
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Between the independence of the colonies from Britain and the onset of the Jacksonian age, American readers indulged in a vast array of literary works known as fragments. American Fragments reclaims this archive of the romantic period to pose a series of critical inquiries concerning the interplay between aesthetic and national realities. Firstly, what kind of artistic creation emerged as a fragment? Secondly, how and why did deliberately unfinished writing coexist alongside a country that was itself still in the process of formation? By exploring eighteenth-century transatlantic aesthetics, the Revolutionary War, seduction novels, religious culture, and the construction of authorship, Daniel Diez Couch argues that the literary fragment served as a means of representing individuals who did not easily fit into the social fabric of the nation. These individuals, including beggars, prostitutes, veterans, and other marginalized figures, found themselves excluded from plans for the country's future. However, writers employed the artistic form of the fragment as a tool to survey their contested positionality. Time and again, fragments sought to answer the question of what kind of identity marginalized individuals possessed, and how fictionalized versions of their life stories influenced the sociopolitical circumstances of the emerging nation. In their most progressive moments, the writers of fragments portrayed their subjects as being in a state of continuous transformation, opting for a fluid version of the self rather than the bounded and coherent one often celebrated as the liberal individual.

American Fragments traverses aesthetics, political philosophy, material culture, and history, giving new life to a literary form that played a significant role in the print ecology of the early republic and continues to resonate in the works of modernist and postmodernist writers. Through its meticulous examination of fragments, American Fragments sheds light on the complex relationship between aesthetics, national identity, and the construction of the self in the early American republic.

Dimension: 229 x 152 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780812253795