Race, Citizenship, and Law in American Literature

In this broad ranging and powerful study, Gregg Crane examines the interaction between civic identity, race and justice in American law and literature. Crane recounts the efforts of literary and legal figures to bring the nation’s law into line with the moral consensus that slavery and racial oppression were evil. By documenting an actual historical interaction central both to American literature and American constitutional law, Crane reveals the influence of literature on the constitutional discourse of citizenship. Covering such writers as Harriet Beecher Stowe, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Frederick Douglass, and a whole range of novelists, poets, philosophers, politicians, lawyers and judges, this is a remarkably original book, that will revise the relationship between race and nationalism in American literature.

• Covers a broad range of novelists, poets, philosophers, activists, political scientists, politicians, lawyers and judges • Will appeal to students of legal and political history as well as literary studies • Interdisciplinary approach by a scholar trained in both literary and legal discourse

Acknowledgments; Introduction; 1. Higher law in the 1850s; 2. The look of higher law: Harriet Beecher Stowe’s antislavery fiction; 3. Cosmopolitan constitutionalism: Emerson and Douglass; 4. The positivist alternative; 5. Charles Chesnutt and Moorfield Storey: citizenship and the flux of contract.

‘A profound and moving book that deserves a wide audience. Crane displays a searching wisdom and precise imagination in brilliantly describing the moral universe where literature and law meet in key texts of the nineteenth century. An indispensable study of nationalism and race and their impact on American law and literature.’ Eric Sundquist

‘An ambitious, brilliant, study of American literary and legal texts from the late eighteenth into the twentieth century. This profoundly interdisciplinary study of law and literature, written by someone who has clearly mastered both disciplines, is also a major contribution to African American literary and cultural studies.’ Robert Levine

‘This book will force scholars in the field to revise their understanding of the political heritage of the Emersonian tradition.’ Brook Thomas

Gregg D. Crane wins his laurels for a detailed and well-reasoned work of extraordinary intensity …\'. American Studies