Counterfeiting in American literature
Item
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Title
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Counterfeiting in American literature
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Identifier
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d_2009_2013:b3c559b428aa:10537
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identifier
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10885
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Creator
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Barosky, Todd,
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Contributor
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David S. Reynolds
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Date
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2010
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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American literature | American studies | American | counterfeiter | counterfeiting | Literature
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Abstract
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This dissertation provides an analysis of representations of counterfeiting in American literature across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. One of the oldest crimes in America and until the Civil War one of the most prevalent, counterfeiting appealed to the literary imagination not merely because it was so common, but because, as a fundamentally ambiguous activity, it seemed to expose significant fault lines in American life. The ambiguity of counterfeiting arose from the fact that its performance, and especially its successful performance, explicitly challenged the stability of the concepts, such as monetary value and sovereign authority, that were necessary to define it as a crime. Counterfeiting thus probed the shifting and often permeable boundaries between what was considered legitimate and illegitimate, legal and illegal, moral and immoral, natural and artificial, valuable and valueless, real and imaginary.;The subject of counterfeiting became for a diverse group of American writers, from Benjamin Franklin, Stephen Burroughs and Charles Brockden Brown in the eighteenth century, to John Neal, George Lippard, and Herman Melville in the nineteenth century, a lens through which social and political analysis could be brought into focus, and a fertile source of philosophical speculation and literary creation. Once it was figured as a literary subject, counterfeiting also had a profound impact on the texture and development of American literature across this period. Most obviously, attempts to represent counterfeiting and counterfeiters gave rise to new experiences, new characters, new settings, and new vernaculars. Less obviously, the ambiguity of counterfeiting was such that it exerted pressure on the traditional literary forms, such as the picaresque narrative and the gothic novel, which were deployed in an effort to make it meaningful. What is more, sustained reflection upon the meaning of counterfeiting often led American writers to doubt the possibility of truthful or meaningful representation as such.;Counterfeiting in American Literature thus seeks to demonstrate that the subject of counterfeiting exists in American literature as a site of literary creativity and cultural tension, a site where older literary forms are recast to fit new circumstances, and where different ideas are inaugurated and tested.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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2009_2013.csv
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degree
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Ph.D.
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Program
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English
