A01=Andrew Kopec
African American literature
American women's writing
antebellum American literature
Author_Andrew Kopec
Black American writing
business cycles
business turbulence
capitalism
capitalism and enslavement
Category=DSBF
Category=JBSL
Category=KCSA
economics and literature
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_business-finance-law
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
financial crisis in the nineteenth-century United States
financial speculation
identity and capitalism
literature and enslavement
Money and banking in literature
new history of capitalism
nineteenth-century American literature
personality
risk and literature
risk taking
selfhood
success and failure
Transcendentalism
woman's fiction
Product details
- ISBN 9781469690179
- Dimensions: 25 x 235mm
- Publication Date: 30 Sep 2025
- Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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People living in the nineteenth-century United States saw shocking upheavals in both the economy and in ideas of selfhood in a commercial society. Narratives such as Horatio Alger's rags-to-riches tales allured Americans with visions of financial success, while events such as the Panics of 8 9, 837, 857, and 8 5 threatened them with sudden and devastating financial failure. The antebellum period's "go-ahead" ethos encouraged individuals to form an identity amid this chaos by striving for financial success through risk-taking—that is, to form a capitalist self. Andrew Kopec argues that writers of this era were not immune to this business turbulence rather, their responses to it shaped the development of American literature. By examining the public and private writings of well-known American writers—including Washington Irving, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Frederick Douglass—Kopec contends that, instead of anxiously retreating from the volatile market, these figures deliberately engaged with it in their writing.
These writers grappled with both the limits and opportunities of capitalist selfhood and tried, in various ways, to harness the economy's energies for the benefit of the self. In making this argument, Kopec invites readers to consider how this era of American literature questioned the ideologies of capitalist identity that seem inescapable today.
These writers grappled with both the limits and opportunities of capitalist selfhood and tried, in various ways, to harness the economy's energies for the benefit of the self. In making this argument, Kopec invites readers to consider how this era of American literature questioned the ideologies of capitalist identity that seem inescapable today.
Andrew Kopec is associate professor of English at Purdue University Fort Wayne.
