Overview

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.

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9780198996514

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Reviews

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. * Lisa Siraganian, author of The Problem of Personhood: Giving Rights to Trees, Corporations and Robots * Antebellum Americans, Peter Jaros shows, did much more than think about the corporations that were mushrooming all around them. As this immensely readable new book demonstrates, they thought with and through the corporate form to understand the relations between individuality and collectivity, freedom and servitude, economics and politics, representation and belonging, humanity and inhumanity. * Jeannine Marie DeLombard, University of California, Santa Barbara *

Author Information

Peter Jaros is Associate Professor of English at Franklin & Marshall College.

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