The Corporation in the Nineteenth-Century American Imagination

✍ Scribed by Stefanie Meuller

Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Year: 2022
Tongue: English
Leaves: 220
Category: Library

⬇ Acquire This Volume

No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.

✦ Synopsis

The first study of the representation of corporations in US law, literature, and culture

Covers key topics in company law including the emergence of corporate personhood, the regulation of monopolies, the piercing of the corporate veil, agent-principal relationships and examines their literary and cultural manifestations
Presents interdisciplinary readings of legal, literary and visual texts, including legal treatises, caricatures, novels, and magazine publications
Draws on literary texts including Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton’s The Squatter and the Don, James Fenimore Cooper’s The Bravo, Frank Norris’ The Octopus and Charles W. Chesnutt’s The Partners
Draws on cases including Charles River Bridge v. Warren Bridge (1837), Munn v. The State of Illinois (1877) and Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad (1886)

This book examines the way the corporation – a legal concept of enduring and timely importance in the Anglo-American legal tradition – was imagined in the nineteenth century historical imagination.

Stefanie Mueller traces the ways in which literary and cultural representations of the corporation in nineteenth-century America helped shift how the corporation was envisioned; from a public tool meant to serve the common good, to an instrument of private enterprise. She explores how artists and writers together with lawyers and economists represented this transformation through narrative and metaphor. Drawing on a range of legal, literary and visual texts, she shows how the corporation’s public origins as well as its fundamentally collective nature continued to be relevant much longer than previous scholarship has argued.

✦ Table of Contents

Contents
Figures
Acknowledgments
Introduction: The Many and the One: Corporate Bodies and the Body Politic in US Law and Culture
1 Narrating Monopoly and Empire: Austin, Irving, and the Charles River Bridge Case
2 The Soulless Corporation: Cooper and the Decline of the Republic
3 Satanic Corporate Agents in the Marketplace: Hawthorne, Melville, De Forest, and the Uses of Allegory
4 Incorporating the Nation: Ruiz de Burton and “Quasi Public” Corporations
5 The End of Individualism: Tarbell, Norris, and the Power of Combinations
Conclusion: Frankenstein in a Gray Flannel Suit
Bibliography
Index

📜 SIMILAR VOLUMES

Imagining Equality in Nineteenth-Century

📁 Imagining Equality in Nineteenth-Century American Literature

✍ Kerry Larson 📂 Library 📅 2008 🏛 Cambridge University Press 🌐 English

The theme of inequality has often dominated academic criticism, which has been concerned with identifying, analyzing, and demystifying various regimes of power and the illicit hierarchies upon which they are built. Studies of the United States in the nineteenth century have followed this trend in fo

Imagining 'America' in late Nineteenth C

📁 Imagining 'America' in late Nineteenth Century Spain

✍ Kate Ferris (auth.) 📂 Library 📅 2016 🏛 Palgrave Macmillan UK 🌐 English

<p><p>This book examines the processes of production, circulation and reception of images of America in late nineteenth century Spain. When late nineteenth century Spaniards looked at the United States, they, like Tocqueville, ‘saw more than America’. What did they see? Between the ‘glorious’ libera

America in Imaginative German Literature

📁 America in Imaginative German Literature in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century

✍ Paul C. Weber 📂 Library 📅 2019 🏛 Columbia University Press 🌐 English

<p>Examines how the United States was presented to the German reader during the first half of the nineteenth century through imaginative literature. Follows this theme chronologically through the literary resources from 1800 to 1850.</p>

Domestic individualism: imagining self i

📁 Domestic individualism: imagining self in nineteenth-century America

✍ Gillian Brown 📂 Library 📅 1992 🏛 University of California Press 🌐 English

Gillian Brown's book probes the key relationship between domestic ideology and formulations of the self in nineteenth-century America. Arguing that domesticity institutes gender, class, and racial distinctions that govern masculine as well as feminine identity, Brown brilliantly alters, for literary

Domestic Individualism: Imagining Self i

📁 Domestic Individualism: Imagining Self in Nineteenth-century America

✍ Gillian Brown 📂 Library 📅 1990 🌐 English

"A fine book that is sure to provoke interesting debates. . . . Paying close attention to the implications of gender and domesticity for American notions of individualism, Brown draws upon new questions of method and theory to provide fresh readings of canonical texts."--Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, auth

America Imagined: Explaining the United

📁 America Imagined: Explaining the United States in Nineteenth-Century Europe and Latin America

✍ Axel Körner, Nicola Miller, Adam I. P. Smith (eds.) 📂 Library 📅 2012 🏛 Palgrave Macmillan US 🌐 English