"Withersoever We Turn Our Eyes": Reimagining Democratic Writing in Nineteenth-Century Print Culture.

This essay studies three books on nineteenth-century US print culture: D. Berton Emerson's American Literary Misfits: The Alternative Democracies of Mid-Nineteenth-Century Print Cultures (2024), Bryan Sinche's Published by the Author: Self-Publication in Nineteenth-Century African American Literature (2024), and Susan J. Stanfield's Rewriting Citizenship: Women, Race, and Nineteenth-Century Print Culture (2022). Examining print micro-cultures, from self-published sermons to obscure urban novels and pamphlets promoting true womanhood among Black men and women, these scholars invest in hope. They take for granted that democracy in some form will flourish in US local cultures and among the common people despite whatever political direction the US nation state itself might be taking. From where does this faith in the inevitable presence of democracy on US soil descend? This essay suggests that scholars remain unconsciously indebted to nineteenth-century providential histories that depicted the US as an originator and avatar of modern democratic revolutions. Working with the assumption that the US at any given moment must be germinating a more just future, these scholars are able to locate insipient democracy in surprising texts. Their hopefulness connects them to a long line of nineteenth-century cultural theorists who believed that US popular and marginal cultures will produce the voices of the democratic future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]