The Corporate Forms of Antebellum US Literature
Series: Law and Literature;
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Product details:
- Publisher OUP Oxford
- Date of Publication 28 May 2026
- ISBN 9780198996514
- Binding Hardback
- No. of pages256 pages
- Size 241x165x20 mm
- Weight 585 g
- Language English 699
Categories
Short description:
How did nineteenth-century writers contend with corporations, and how can their work inform our own confrontations with the corporate form? This book shows how writers apprehended the corporation in sophisticated and often funny ways in the wake of Dartmouth v. Woodward, which enshrined the definition of the corporation in American jurisprudence.
MoreLong description:
Through close examination of legal and literary texts, The Corporate Forms of Antebellum US Literature tells the story of the corporation in antebellum US law, literature, and culture. It unfolds a rich and varied corporate imaginary that both illuminates the prehistory of today's corporations and captures forgotten and unrealized conceptions of personhood, politics, and collectivity. Centered on an era during which both person and corporation were contested terms, this book shows how a seemingly instrumental legal category spurred reflection on human identity, mortality and immortality, slavery and freedom, and the possibilities of social and political belonging.
In the wake of Trustees of Dartmouth College v. Woodward (1819), the corporation was recognized as a flexible and powerful form for enterprises ranging from banks to mutual aid societies to utopian communities, even as its status as a legal person spurred reflection on natural and artificial personhood. Antebellum American writers took on corporate personhood and reframed it as literary personification; they explored and reimagined the tropes at the heart of the legal doctrine of the corporation, including artificiality, immortality, multiplicity, and succession; and they experimented with social and literary forms derived from the corporation.
By examining the ways writers theorized, figured, and deployed the corporate form within and beyond the law, this study both elucidates dominant conceptions of the corporation and reveals a multitude of paths not taken. It wagers that attending to the corporation as a form--or collection of forms--at the intersection of antebellum US law, literature, and culture can both inform our contemporary entanglements with the corporation and bring an unfamiliar perspective to recent debates about form.
What if today's corporation could have been a totally different entity? With erudition and interdisciplinary inventiveness, Peter Jaros elegantly recovers fascinating and unfamiliar visions of the corporate form as dreamed up by writers ranging from Emerson and Melville, to Lieber and Irving. Along the way, Jaros reveals how nineteenth-century American corporations were imaginative laboratories for collective life, long before Citizens United changed our story.
Table of Contents:
Introduction: Incorporate Things
A Double Life: Personifying the Corporation from Dartmouth College to Poe
The Corporation and the Encyclopedia: Theorizing and Practicing Assemblage in the Age of Association
The Faculties of Law: Constituting Persons in Robert Montgomery Bird's Sheppard Lee
Irving's Astoria and the Forms of Enterprise
A Company of Socialists: The Corporate Imaginary in Associationist Print
Assembled Companies: The Corporate Forms of The Confidence-Man
