Wildermuth AI (2025)
Publication Type: Journal article
Publication year: 2025
Book Volume: 70
Pages Range: 135 - 155
Journal Issue: 2
Open Access Link: https://amst.winter-verlag.de/article/AMST/2025/2/5
This article introduces what the author reads as debates over “malleability”—or, the aesthetics and politics of change—in literary and other print texts in the nineteenth-century United States. After providing theoretical context for malleability as a tool in canon work and comparative close readings, the article examines the historical conditions around this development. In the wake of seismic shifts in political economy and print technology, in the late 1820s, argued here is that there arises a fundamentally new, radical type of writing—especially by Black and Indigenous authors—that opens the door to the three-part ideological shift traced by a comparative analysis of malleability. The article offers an example of such an understanding of nineteenth-century print by way of Douglass’s "Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass" (1845), a text that reflects highly self-consciously on these nascent relations of print and politics. The article considers the relation in "Narrative" between print culture and violence as exemplary of the “radical-critical” engagement with malleability.
APA:
Wildermuth, A.I. (2025). American Malleability: 1820s Print Revolutions and the Aesthetics and Politics of Change in Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. Amerikastudien, 70(2), 135 - 155.
MLA:
Wildermuth, Andrew Isaac. "American Malleability: 1820s Print Revolutions and the Aesthetics and Politics of Change in Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass." Amerikastudien 70.2 (2025): 135 - 155.
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