Governing imagination: American social romanticism, 1790--1840

"Governing Imagination" argues that Americans first experience romanticism collectively as an innovation in institutions, in images, and in texts. My analysis of this least-known period of American literary history demonstrates how tension between collective order and individual freedom---between "governing" and "imagination"---frames the emergence of romanticism in the United States prior to Transcendentalism. This project's trans-Atlantic and interdisciplinary approach, which analyzes institutional spaces and women's commonplace books together with published texts by canonical authors, recognizes the central role that women and consumption play in the story of American romanticism and contributes to understanding the social production of aesthetic innovation. William Dunlap and Charles Brockden Brown's work to promote August von Kotzebue's politically radical melodramas for the elite audiences of New York's Park Theater exemplifies how the romantic movement takes hold in the middle Atlantic region. Brown's novel Ormond, I argue, reflects upon the transformation of melodrama from a demonstration of the intuitive, natural virtue of lowly people to the naturalization of middle-class decorum. The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts purchases Washington Allston's painting Dead Man Restored to Life to achieve a similar goal. The Academy seeks to develop imaginative art spectators for its institution rather than independent craftsmen. On a more personal level, readers are attracted to Lord Byron's poetry and make imitative Byronic verses in their commonplace books-including John Neal's novel Logan , which he describes as a commonplace book-to engage with the question of whether humans have the agency to change art or history. The end of this audience-driven early romanticism is signaled by the contrast between Washington Irving's subversive, text stealing poachers in The Sketch-Book and James Fenimore Cooper's visionary poacher in The Pioneers who obligingly moves westward ahead of the laws that will create an author-based literary property regime. "Governing Imagination" expands our understanding of the shift from the political and historical writing of the eighteenth-century to the nineteenth-century's emphasis on imaginative, national literature by showing how early American romantic culture uses questions of performance, originality, and agency to bridge the gap between collective historical experience and individual aesthetic creation.