The Literature of Labor and the Labors of Literature: Allegory in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction

284 Pages·2008·6.39 MB·English

by  Cindy Weinstein

The Literature of Labor and the Labors of Literature juxtaposes representations of
labor in fictional texts with representations of labor in nonfictional texts in order
to trace the intersections between aesthetic and economic discourse in nineteenth-
century America. This intersection is particularly evident in the debates about
symbol and allegory, and the author contends that allegory during this period was
critiqued on precisely the same grounds as mechanized labor. Despite the undeni-
able differences between literary characters and historical workers, the discursive
possibilities for constructing the character of both fictional and nonfictional per-
sons are strikingly similar. Both allegory and new forms of labor produced a
version of personhood that seemed frighteningly flat, a flatness that attacked the
substance of the work ethic and, indeed, the very foundations of American
individualism.
Using this contextualized model of allegory, Weinstein goes on to argue that
texts by Hawthorne, Melville, Twain, and Henry Adams are best understood as
both allegories of labor (that is, the allegorical representations of the nature and cost
of being a laboring being) and labors of allegory (that is, the visibility of the
author's work of representation). In the course of completing a historical investiga-
tion, Weinstein revolutionizes the notion of allegorical narrative, which is exposed
as a literary medium of greater complexity and consequence than has previously
been implied - a working authorial vehicle for engaged and at times socially turbu-
lent thought.

CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN AMERICAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE
The Literature of Labor and the Labors of Literature
CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN AMERICAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE
Editor:
ERIC SUNDQUIST, University of California, Los Angeles
Founding Editor:
ALBERT GELPI, Stanford University
Advisory Board:
Nina Baym, University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana
Sacvan Bercovitch, Harvard University
Albert Gelpi, Stanford University
Myra Jehlen, University of Pennsylvania
Carolyn Porter, University of California, Berkeley
Robert Stepto, Yale University
Tony Tanner, King's College, Cambridge University
Books in the series:
88. Rafael Perez-Torres, Movements in Chicano Poetry — Against Myths,
Against Margins
87. Rita Barnard, The Great Depression and the Culture of Abundance
86. Kenneth Asher, T. S. Eliot and Ideology
85. Robert Milder, Reimagining Thoreau
84. Blanche H. Gelfant, Literary Reckonings: A Cross-Cultural Triptych
83. Robert Tilton, The Pocahontas Narrative in Antebellum America
82. Joan Burbick, Healing the Republic: The Language of Health and the Culture of
Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century America
81. Rena Fraden, Blueprints for a Black Federal Theatre, 1935-1939
80. Ed Folsom, Walt Whitman's Native Representations
79. Alan Filreis, Modernism from Right to Left
78. Michael E. Staub, Voices of Persuasion: The Politics of Representation
in 1930s America
11. Katherine Kearns, Robert Frost and a Poetics of Appetite
76. Peter Halter, The Revolution in the Visual Arts and the Poetry of
William Carlos Williams
75. Barry Ahearn, William Carlos Williams and Alterity: The Early Poetry
74. Linda A. Kinnahan, Poetics of the Feminine: Authority and Literary Tradition in
William Carlos Williams, Mina Loy, Denise Levertov, and Kathleen Fraser
73. Bernard Rosenthal, Salem Story: Reading the Witch Trials of 1692
72. Jon Lance Bacon, Flannery O'Connor and Cold War Culture
71. Nathaniel Mackey, Discrepant Engagement: Dissonance, Cross-Culturality and
Experimental Writing
70. David M. Robinson, Emerson and the Conduct of Life
69. Cary Wolfe, The Limits of American Literary Ideology in Pound and Emerson
68. Andrew Levy, The Culture and Commerce of the American Short Story
67. Stephen Fredman, The Grounding of American Poetry: Charles Olson and the
Emersonian Tradition
Continued on pages following the Index
The Literature of Labor
and the Labors of Literature
Allegory in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction
CINDY WEINSTEIN
California Institute of Technology
CAMBRIDGE
UNIVERSITY PRESS
CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, Sao Paulo
Cambridge University Press
The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK
Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York
www.cambridge.org
Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521470544
© Cambridge University Press 1995
This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception
and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,
no reproduction of any part may take place without the written
permission of Cambridge University Press.
First published 1995
This digitally printed version 2008
A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data
We in stein, Cindy.
The literature of labor and the labors of literature : allegory in
nineteenth-century American fiction / Cindy Weinstein.
p. cm. - (Cambridge studies in American literature and
culture : 89)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-521-47054-4 (he)
1. American fiction - 19th century - History and criticism.
2. Work - Social aspects - United States - History - 19th century.
3. Aesthetics, American - 19th century. 4. Working class in
literature. 5. Work in literature. 6. Allegory. - I. Title.
II. Series.
PS374.W64W45 1995
813'.409355 - dc20 94-12212
ISBN 978-0-521-47054-4 hardback
ISBN 978-0-521-05458-4 paperback
For my mother and my father, whose memory is safe in mine

Do your work, and I shall know you. Do your work, and you
shall reinforce yourself.
Emerson, "Self-Reliance"