Reimagines the American 19th century through a sweeping
interdisciplinary engagement with oceans, genres, and time
Emergent Worlds re-locates nineteenth-century America from the land to
the oceans and seas that surrounded it. Edward Sugden argues that these
ocean spaces existed in a unique historical fold between the
transformations that inaugurated the modern era--colonialism to
nationalism, mercantilism to capitalism, slavery to freedom, and
deferent subject to free citizen. As travellers, workers, and writers
journeyed across the Pacific, Atlantic, and Caribbean Sea, they had to
adapt their political expectations to the interstitial social realities
that they saw before them while also feeling their very consciousness,
particularly their perception of time, mutate. These four
domains--oceanic geography, historical folds, emergent politics, and
dissonant times--in turn, provided the conditions for the development of
three previously unnamed genres of the 1850s: the Pacific elegy, the
black counterfactual, and the immigrant gothic.
In telling the history of these emergent worlds and their importance to
the development of the literary cultures of the US Americas, Sugden
proposes narratives that alter some of the most enduring myths of the
field, including the westward spread of US imperialism, the
redemptionist trajectory of black historiography, and the notion that
the US Americas constituted a new world. Introducing a new generic
vocabulary for describing the literature of the 1850s and crossing over
oceans and languages, Emergent Worlds invokes an alternative
nineteenth-century America that provides nothing less than a new way to
read the era.
