Document Type

Peer Reviewed Article

Publication Date

2015

Abstract

This essay argues that George Lippard’s The Quaker City (1844–1845), originally published in ten separate numbers, is best understood when read more consistently with Lippard’s own mid-production assessment: that he was producing two different books, a novel and its sequel. Doing so reveals that the target of Lippard’s unruly social protest transitions away from a nation-framed story featuring the seduction of an innocent woman and the moral degradation of a community in which such a crime would be possible, to a broader complaint in the sequel against the lack of democratic power and agency at the local level. I start by reconstructing the disjointed composition and publication-in-parts schedule of The Quaker City, along with some historical developments that might have led to its changed course, in order to highlight Lippard’s shifting design and the narrative’s vernacular aesthetics. Turning to the narrative, I explore how the shifting trajectory between novel and sequel becomes most compelling in Lippard’s treatment of printed texts/print culture and bodies/body politic, two entities frequently evoked in the cultivation and understanding of national (imagined) community. In Lippard’s imaginative revision, the sequel thus grapples with alternative political possibilities that discard faith in nation-scaled remedies and instead works through the complexities of a regenerated, localized democracy.

Rights

Published as D. Berton Emerson, “George Lippard’s The Quaker City: Disjointed Text, Dismembered Bodies, Regenerated Democracy,” Nineteenth-Century Literature, Vol. 70, No. 1, pp. 102–131, © 2015 by The Regents of the University of California. Copying and permissions notice: Authorization to copy this content beyond fair use (as specified in Sections 107 and 108 of the U. S. Copyright Law) for internal or personal use, or the internal or personal use of specific clients, is granted by the Regents of the University of California for libraries and other users, provided that they are registered with and pay the specified fee via Rightslink® or directly with the Copyright Clearance Center.

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