Nineteenth-Century Americans saw danger lurking everywhere: in
railway cars and trolleys, fireplaces and floods, and amid social
and political movements, from the abolition of slavery to suffrage.
After the Civil War, Americans were shaken by financial panic and a
volatile post-slave economy. They were awe-struck and progressively
alarmed by technological innovations that promised speed and
commercial growth, but also posed unprecedented physical hazard.
Most of all, Americans were uncertain, particularly in light of
environmental disasters like hurricanes and wildfires, about their
own city on a hill and the once indisputable and protective hand of
a beneficent God. The disasters, accidents, and social and
political upheavals that characterized nineteenth-century culture
had enormous explanatory power, metaphoric and real. Today we speak
of similar insecurities: financial, informational, environmental,
and political, and we obsessively express our worry and fear for
the future. Cultural theorist Paul Virilio refers to these feelings
as the "threat horizon," one that endlessly identifies and produces
new dangers. Why, he asks, does it seem easier for humanity to
imagine a future shaped by ever-deadlier accidents than a decent
future? Danger and Vulnerability in Nineteenth Century American
Literature; or, Crash and Burn American invites readers to examine
the "threat horizon" through its nascent expression in literary and
cultural history. Against the emerging rhetoric of danger in the
long nineteenth century, this book examines how a vocabulary of
vulnerability in the American imaginary promoted the causes of the
structurally disempowered in new and surprising ways, often seizing
vulnerability as the grounds for progressive insight. The texts at
the heart of this study, from nineteenth-century sensation novels
to early twentieth-century journalistic fiction, imagine
spectacular collisions, terrifying conflagrations, and all manner
of catastrophe, social, political, and environmental. Together they
write against illusions of inviolability in a growing technological
and managerial culture, and they imagine how the recognition of
universal vulnerability may challenge normative representations of
social, political, and economic marginality.
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