Corporation in the Nineteenth-Century American Imagination

Stefanie Mueller is an Adjunct Professor at the Institute of English and American Studies, Goethe-University Frankfurt, Germany. She is the author of The Presence of the Past in the Novels of Toni Morrison (Winter Verlag, 2013), which combines narratological analysis with the tools of figurational and relational sociology. She has also co-edited collections that present work in media and popular culture studies as well as economic criticism and literary sociology, most recently Reading the Social in American Studies (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022). She has been a visiting scholar at Harvard University, Cambridge, and the University of California, Irvine. Her current research examines US citizenship in lyric poetry and law as well as questions of scale and genre in environmental fiction and film.

Stefanie Mueller’s engaging and insightful The Corporation in the Nineteenth-Century American Imagination offers compelling answers to [...] complex questions and profound insights on the history of liberal individualism, literary culture, and corporate power in the United States.

• Introduction: The Many and the One: Corporate Bodies and the Body Politic in US Law and Culture1. Narrating Monopoly and Empire: Austin, Irving and the Charles River Bridge Case2. The Soulless Corporation: Cooper and the Decline of the Republic3. Satanic Corporate Agents in the Marketplace: Hawthorne, Melville, De Forest and the Uses of Allegory4. Incorporating the Nation: Ruiz de Burton and ‘Quasi Public’ Corporations5. The End of Individualism: Tarbell, Norris and the Power of CombinationsConclusion: Frankenstein in a Gray Flannel SuitBibliographyIndex