Complicity and the Antebellum Moral Imagination

Erscheinungsjahr 2026
ISBN: 978-1-009-68551-1
Verlag: Cambridge University Press

Buch, Englisch, 295 Seiten, Gewicht: 500 g

Reihe: Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture

By what routes and on what grounds do moral blame and shame for social wrongs fall on individuals, groups, and institutions? To answer this question is necessarily to excite the moral imagination, to envision our moral connection to social, economic, and political harms that may appear remote or opaque. Between 1830 and 1860, American religious authorities, novelists, abolitionists, market activists, and political insiders trained this imagining. They delineated how moral complicity radiated across urban social networks, criminal conspiracies, political structures, and economic systems. In this original study, Zimmerman illuminates how new conceptions of moral complicity and participatory sin emboldened activists, animated new literary forms, sparked political controversy, and seeded a plan to racially transfigure the Atlantic economy. In media ranging from gothic convent tales to imperial trade proposals, complicity critics conjured not only the dangers but also the responsive duties and opportunities raised by new forms of sociomoral enmeshment.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Zimmerman, David A.

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Introduction; 1. Conspiracy, Contagion, and Catholic Sex Talk; 2. Structure, Network, Apocalypse; 3. Systems: Organic Sin; 4. Tolerance Complicity and Uncle Tom's Cabin; 5. Cotton Complicity: Markets and Moral Objects; 6. The Complicity Windfall: The Black Market and African Cotton; 7. The Coffle and the Capitol; 8. Purity Rights and the Congressional Slave Trade; Epilogue.

Über Autor(innen)

Zimmerman, David A.
David Zimmerman is the author of Panic!: Markets, Crises, and Crowds in American Fiction (2006) and his essays have appeared in Cambridge History of the American Novel, American Literature, American Literary History, J19, ESQ, Arizona Quarterly, and elsewhere.