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1 results

  • Introduction - Politics and Literary History

  • Edited by John D. Kerkering, Loyola University, Chicago
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Companion to Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Politics
    Published online:
    06 March 2025
    Print publication:
    13 March 2025, pp 1-16

  • Summary

    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.