Commensurate with its vast geography and long history, the Ottoman Empire had varied artistic and architectural cultures. Ottoman visual sources reflect the cultural identities, intellectual priorities, and personal as well as political aspirations of artists and patrons. They are instructive about methods of production, the circulation of goods (artworks, artifacts, and raw materials), and creative practices in palaces and urban centers. This chapter focuses on painting and architecture and surveys the available visual materials, demonstrating some of the innovative ways in which recent research has treated Ottoman painting and architecture.

This chapter documents the complex relationship between the papacy and liberation theology. Prior to the explicit emergence of liberation theology, the papacies of Pius XII and John XXIII provided important institutional and theological conditions in which liberation developed and became influential. A relative harmony existed during the ministry of Paul VI, as liberation theologians often took positions influenced theologically by Vatican II and politically by Paul VI’s attention to global poverty and hopes for the underdeveloped world. This tenor changed dramatically under John Paul II and Benedict XVI. Their experiences of communism and reaction to perceived excesses in the implementation of Vatican II translated into great tensions between the Vatican and liberation theologians. The papacy of Francis signals that these tensions have passed, as his priorities align more closely to the work of liberation theologians with important implications for Church governance and in relation to pressing global issues.

The chapter takes stock of the major trends in recent scholarship of medieval heresy and ecclesiastical repression, identifies promising research avenues, and provides an overview of the way in which the papacy confronted the perceived menace of heresy in the central Middle Ages, considering the representations of and responses to religious dissent displayed by the official Church alongside its own motifs and transformations. The implementation of anti-heresy measures are thus observed in light of the main historical developments of the papacy in the central centuries of the Middle Ages: the eleventh-century reform and its institutional legacy; the zenith of papal monarchy; and the Avignon papacy and its political and intellectual developments. In all these different contexts, variously permeated by the ideal of papal theocracy, the Holy See fashioned apt legal and theological responses intended to contain what was featured as an enduring peril threatening the Church and Christendom.

This Introduction distinguishes three approaches to studying politics: political science, political philosophy, and the history of political thought. It identifies the last of these as the focus of the chapters in the collection. It then uses an example from Abraham Lincoln’s 1858 Illinois US Senate debates with Stephen A. Douglas to characterize literature’s relationship to politics. Finally, it distinguishes three approaches to literary history, which it labels poststructuralist discourse analysis, standpoint epistemology, and pragmatism. It treats pragmatism as the most suitable description of the mode of literary history practiced in the chapters in the collection.

The 1820s and 1830s have received less attention than the 1840s and 1850s in histories of US abolition. Attending to African American antislavery activism of the 1820s and 1830s reveals that these were transformative decades, particularly regarding the issues of colonization, immediate abolition, and kidnapping. These specific political concerns of an often-overshadowed constituency, African Americans themselves, shaped the literary conventions of slave narratives published in these earlier two decades. Fugitive slave narratives of the 1820s and 1830s feature an active practice of vigilant watchfulness that anticipates and counters the threat of surveillance through sousveillance (watching from below). Sousveillance is thus a specific narrative manifestation of the vigilance urged by black political activists. Later slave narratives, shaped by the priorities of white-dominated institutional abolition, downplay the agency of African American sousveillants in favor of a more passive story of victimization.

Nineteenth-century women gained limited property and voting rights by embracing naturalized gender roles, including motherhood, as famously described in Catharine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s The American Woman’s Home (1869). Such normative appeals to a feminized domestic sphere appear to contradict a first-wave nineteenth-century feminism that, through efforts like Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s Declaration of Rights and Sentiments (1848), sought political gains for women in the form of property and voting rights equivalent to those of men, but second-wave feminist historians from the 1960s through the 1980s have shown how similar ends were advanced by less radical means: embracing the middle-class mother’s normative gendered role as natural nurturer enabled women to leverage their credibility within the domestic sphere in order to advance political projects both within and beyond it. In addition to resisting traditional restrictions on their rights, women embraced their gendered role as natural mothers to pursue political activism on behalf of impoverished women in urban areas. Third-wave feminism has challenged the normative roles at the core of this gendered separation of spheres, roles that at once restricted nineteenth-century women’s political activity but also authorized them to mobilize, as natural women and mothers, in political resistance to economic oppression.

How did literature and politics blend in nineteenth-century oratory? This chapter argues that the admixture was always particular. Thus it begins by explicating three moments of ordinary oratorical practice in Philadelphia in 1855: a gubernatorial inaugural by James Pollock, an oration by the student Jacob C. White Jr. at the Institute for Colored Youth, and a speech by delegate Mary Ann Shadd at the Colored National Convention. Themes germane to nineteenth-century oratory emerge from these examples: its ubiquity and variety, the interactions of oratorical and print cultures, the critical role of audiences in producing meanings of oratorical events, and the ephemeral characteristics of embodied performance. Further, the emphasis in these examples on freedom, citizenship, learning, leadership, and democratic life highlights political debates on racial justice, slavery, colonization, and emigration, demonstrating the myriad ways in which oratory in the nineteenth-century United States can supply an avenue into culture, voice, and lived experience that helps explain trajectories to our own time.

This chapter is a brief history of the nineteenth-century efforts to expand voting and other political rights, interspersed with analysis of key literary texts in which the question of voting rights is a palpable concern, even though it is sometimes not overtly addressed. It takes as its starting point an early nineteenth-century shift in ideas about qualifications for suffrage, during which the prerequisite of land ownership was replaced by the qualities of “virtue and intelligence.” While this shift ensured almost universal white male suffrage by the 1840s, it also provided an opening – albeit a problematic one – for white women and some African American men and women to agitate for enfranchisement. This chapter demonstrates that literature from the 1830s until the early twentieth century reflected and often intervened in the conversation about the “nature” of women and black men, and whether or not they were suited for integration into the public sphere and specifically into the political realm through voting. Authors such as Margaret Fuller, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and Charles Chesnutt (among many others) represented the women’s suffrage and black suffrage movements in ways designed to change readers’ ideas about the “virtue and intelligence” of the disenfranchised.

Nationalism represents, advances, and protects the interests of a national “people,” but the metaphor of bodily nativity at the core of claims to national unity proved increasingly implausible for a United States that, in the buildup to and the aftermath of the Civil War, proved to be more of a politically divided house than a corporeally singular nation. Efforts of mid-century writers like John W. Deforest and Walt Whitman to imagine a US nation-state as a heterosexual conjugal union between a single, feminized, national body and its governing state-as-husband would face challenges from later writers like William Dean Howells, who imagined increasingly intensive ways for racial difference within this single national body to undermine national unity figured as corporeal nativity. Responding at century’s end to such racial fractures in corporeal unity, W. E. B. Du Bois would displace the now-untenable conjugal union of the US nation-state with a double-consciousness located within the US citizen’s individual self. This hyphenated identity, grounded in a color line, installs the failed legacy of nineteenth-century US nationalism at the core of how twentieth- and twenty-first-century US citizens understand and describe their own and others’ imperial Americanness.

Although racial segregation was a social and literary reality throughout the nineteenth century, it would not come to define political, social, and literary practice until the fin de siècle. The defeat of Populism and the wave of disfranchisement across the South in the 1890s enabled the rise of the segregationist order of Jim Crow. Within this order, black writers incubated the idea that the political fate of black Americans required establishing an African American literature. From the 1890s forward, a variety of black writers, including Charles Chesnutt, Anna Julia Cooper, W. E. B. Du Bois, Sutton E. Griggs, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and J. McHenry Jones, sought in their fictional representations of segregation to determine whether these strictures reflected the political will of white southern elites or the animus of lower-class whites. With no social or political basis for political participation by the southern working classes, the form of black politics that came to predominate in the South was what the historian Judith Stein has called “appeals to the ruling elements of society” for justice and redress, with correlate appeals to black elites to speak for the race. It was also this politics of appeal that structured the rise of African American literature.

In American culture, there is a mix and mismatch of core discourses: religious, Enlightenment, and market economy. Each claims, contributes, and competes for kinds of belonging and national definition, by abstract principles of equality, particular community of religion and nation, and possessive individualism of each one’s own self-interest. Poetry, far from being private reflection or self-referring aesthetic object, is an arena in which each of these discourses encounter each other. Widely circulated in newspapers, magazines, publicly recited, poetry took part in and also refracted, in especially intense and focal ways, the drama, questions, and terms of belonging crucial to, and conflictual in, the unfolding of America. In this chapter, I explore the intercrossing and contention between American discourses of religion, Enlightenment, and individualism in the Abolitionist poetry of Whittier, the poetry of war in Herman Melville and Emily Dickinson, and the poetry of participation in Walt Whitman. In the texts of each, vocabularies, terms, allusion, and critique of American cultural, religious, and political life form complex interchanges, at times through alignment, at times in tense and critical relationship. The poem becomes a field of confrontation, appeal, and address within the context of their writing as voices of culture take on poetic force.

This chapter considers literary expressions of sovereignty in the nineteenth-century United States that underscore sovereignty’s oppositional nature and its productive potential, and it demonstrates how these literary expressions were, like public argument about sovereignty, constructed through the interplay between law and religion. Religious discourse provided a set of terms, examples, and motifs that shaped the nineteenth-century debate over political autonomy as it ranged across matters of territorial possession and the individual conscience. I first briefly address ideas of sovereignty that circulated in the long nineteenth century and informed US literature and public argument. Then I turn to competing visions of sovereignty expressed by the Cherokee Nation, the state of Georgia, the US federal government, and the US Supreme Court in the early decades of the nineteenth century. In the final section, I briefly turn to the figure of John Brown who, in linking the vision of Indigenous sovereignty expressed by the Cherokee Nation to the sovereign individuality espoused by Henry David Thoreau and the Transcendentals, serves as a harbinger of the contests over political sovereignty that ultimately led to the US Civil War.

This chapter explores how country and city stand in as proxies for political, racial, and cultural positions. The country operates as the custodian of the “real America,” which becomes imagined as white, masculine, traditionalist, and working class. The city, meanwhile, teems with the elite and the cosmopolitan. Such gestures conjure away any trace of Indigenous peoples, migrant farmers and ranchers, urban–rural labor alliances, black agrarian Populists, and the city’s intersectional working class. Even as we must acknowledge the generative role country-and-city scholarship has played in US literary criticism, this chapter ultimately calls for rethinking this binary by turning to texts that provide a different account of the rural – a narrative that the country as a concept so effectively obfuscates. Writing by authors such as Hamlin Garland and Zitkála-Šá, conventionally categorized as local-color or regionalist, demonstrates that scarcity and survivance rather than city and country shaped the cultural politics of rural spaces in the nineteenth century. They both challenged the bureaucratic state, as an entity that protected the interests of finance capital by subjecting settlers to constant precarity and violently seeking to dispossess Indigenous peoples of their own land, liberty, and literature.

This chapter surveys the interrelated histories of literature, religion, and politics in the nineteenth-century United States. In the wake of official church disestablishment, a wave of religious fervor combined with a rising tide of immigrants to form a nation in which literature became a venue for conversion, condemnation, and cultural affirmation. From early national historical romances that sought to confirm the new nation as God’s (Protestant) chosen land to Transcendentalist writings that celebrated the sacredness of the individual American soul, nineteenth-century literature tied American identity to religious pluralism and personal devotion. Sentimental novels penned by women writers and narratives of escape written by the formerly enslaved fitted religious tropes of conversion and resurrection to visions of social reform and political regeneration, while Mormons, Millerites, Shakers, Spiritualists, and other religious innovators developed new models of spiritual identity and literary language suited to an expansive and imperial nation. Over the course of the century, literature served as a venue for theological debate, a vehicle for conversion, a passionate plea for abused humanity, and an imaginative space for envisioning social reform. In each of these modes, authors of literature intervened not only in religious discourses but in the vital political life of the nation.