American Fragments

Daniel Diez Couch is Assistant Professor of English at the United States Air Force Academy.

"There's a lot to admire here, including Couch's ability to say something new about topics like the connections between aesthetics and liberal individualism, which may have otherwise seemed exhausted...American Fragments positions itself less as an intervention and more as a contribution, a missing piece that makes the conversation about early US aesthetics more complete." (Eighteenth-Century Studies) "How is it possible that no one before now has written a literary history of the 'fragment' in early US literature, or one which focuses on this form as important to a more broadly targeted literary history? The fact that such a question can even form itself in a reader's mind is usually a concrete sign of an author's success. In the present case, that success rests on the combination of the argument's novelty and the obviousness of its importance to the field...Before this book's publication, the 'fragment' may not have looked like a form essential to early American literary history; afterward, it most certainly does." (Early American Literature) "In American Fragments, Daniel Diez Couch urges us to examine the role that the fragment played both for readers and writers between 1787 and 1813...Couch's work reminds us that there is meaning in the partial, intentionally incomplete silences of these fragments. Early American scholars will find this well-written analysis a thought-provoking addition to our understanding of this tumultuous and transitional period." (Eighteenth-Century Fiction) "The book is excellent. If American Fragments could be said to have any shortcomings, it is that Couch almost undersells how important this work is for introducing possibilities for studying other genres of literature that fall outside of the novel, poem, or play...Written during a moment when our society is also fractured along various lines, American Fragments offers ways of reading fragmentation anew, as something partial but generative, symbolizing the potential for representation for those socially and politically marginalized for being assumed incomplete." (Journal of the Early Republic) "[F]irst-rate scholarship...American Fragments demands a rethinking of the literary field in the early national period, a rethinking that— among other things—would completely change the way many of us teach....Couch's book testifies to both the creativity and energy of our moment...Books like American Fragments help imagine a future that includes more voices, more nuanced understandings of literary history." (American Literary History) "In a field that has for decades glanced only fleetingly at the formal category of the fragment without focusing its critical attention, American Fragments is both a flash of illumination and a corrective lens. It restores to us, through the early republic's minor forms, some of the freedom—and the historical contingency—that has been obscured by the myth of the national plot." (Matthew Garrett, Wesleyan University)

• ContentsIntroduction. Thinking in Parts in American LiteratureChapter 1. Eighteenth-Century Philosophies of the FragmentChapter 2. Wounded Bodies and the Typographies of WarChapter 3. Ruinous Designs and the Novel of SeductionChapter 4. Biblical Economy and the Miracle of the Loaves and FishChapter 5. Authentic Authorship and the Composition of Sick FragmentsEpilogue. Fragments in the Nineteenth CenturyNotesBibliographyIndexAcknowledgments