Liberalism and the Culture of Security: The Nineteenth-Century Rhetoric of Reform - Hardcover

Henry, Katherine

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0817317228 ISBN 13: 9780817317225

Publisher: University Alabama Press, 2011

Synopsis

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Figures of protection and security are everywhere in American public discourse, from the protection of privacy or civil liberties to the protection of marriage or the unborn, and from social security to homeland security. Liberalism and the Culture of Security traces a crucial paradox in historical and contemporary notions of citizenship: in a liberal democratic culture that imagines its citizens as self-reliant, autonomous, and inviolable, the truth is that claims for citizenship—particularly for marginalized groups such as women and slaves—have just as often been made in the name of vulnerability and helplessness. Katherine Henry traces this turn back to the eighteenth-century opposition of liberty and tyranny, which imagined our liberties as being in danger of violation by the forces of tyranny and thus in need of protection. She examines four particular instances of this rhetorical pattern. The first chapters show how women’s rights and antislavery activists in the antebellum era exploited the contradictions that arose from the liberal promise of a protected citizenry: first by focusing primarily on arguments over slavery in the 1850s that invoke the Declaration of Independence, including Harriet Beecher Stowe’s fiction and Frederick Douglass’s “Fourth of July” speech; and next by examining Angelina Grimké’s brief but intense antislavery speaking career in the 1830s. New conditions after the Civil War and Emancipation changed the way arguments about civic inclusion and exclusion could be advanced. Henry considers the issue of African American citizenship in the 1880s and 1890s, focusing on the mainstream white Southern debate over segregation and the specter of a tyrannical federal government, and then turning to Frances E. W. Harper’s fictional account of African American citizenship in Iola Leroy. Finally, Henry examines Henry James’s 1886 novel The Bostonians, in which arguments over the appropriate role of women and the proper place of the South in post–Civil War America are played out as a contest between Olive Chancellor and Basil ransom for control over the voice of the eloquent girl Verena Tarrant.

About this title

About the Author:

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Katherine Henry is an associate professor of English at Temple University and author of several articles and book chapters, including “Slavery and Civic recovery: Gothic Interventions in Whitman and Weld” in The Gothic Other: Racial and Social Constructions in the Literary Imagination, edited by Ruth Bienstock Anolik and Douglas L. Howard.

Review:

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“Henry offers a very suggestive rereading of the liberal tradition in the United States, one that disrupts traditional conceptions that have been based on the foundation of the autonomous, imperial self. Henry reimagines liberalism as a discursive formation grounded on a discourse of protected vulnerability, one that makes protection and injury mutually constitutive (rather than opposed) categories and that designates the battle to control the conceptual category of vulnerability the central debate of liberal politics. I think this revisionary claim is quite strong.”—Arthur Riss, author of Race, Slavery, and Liberalism in Nineteenth-Century American Literature

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“What makes [Katherine] Henry’s narrative unique is that she carefully looks at the concept of ‘liberalism,’ and she discusses the American contributions to the ideas of democracy and freedom. . . . Henry manages to do in four chapters what other scholars have taken volumes to accomplish. Summing Up: Highly recommended.”--Choice

About this edition

• Publisher: University Alabama Press
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 0817317228
• ISBN 13: 9780817317225
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 232