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Edinburgh Critical Studies in Law, Literature and the Humanities

The Corporation in the Nineteenth-Century American Imagination

By Stefanie Mueller

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£95.00

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About this book

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.

Reviews

Stefanie Mueller’s engaging and insightful The Corporation in the Nineteenth-Century American Imagination offers compelling answers to [...] complex questions and profound insights on the history of liberal individualism, literary culture, and corporate power in the United States.
Stefanie Mueller’s engaging and insightful The Corporation in the Nineteenth-Century American Imagination offers compelling answers to [...] complex questions and profound insights on the history of liberal individualism, literary culture, and corporate power in the United States.
Mueller’s critique has never been more important—the omnipotent, immortal corporation brings not just worry about Citizens United and the speaking dollar, but also the prospect of the corporate maw feeding itself and metastasizing in unprecedented ways; we are faced with artificial intelligence and even artificial neural networks, as well as the material and intellectual consumption of global archives and resources by that voracious artificial mouth. Mueller’s cultural history offers critical vocabulary essential to understanding and countering the quickly approaching event horizon that corporate artificial intelligence portends—the offloading of corporal being and so-called thinking onto computer networks while national collectivities, at all levels and in all forms, fail to stop it.
Table of contents

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

About the author

Stefanie Mueller

Stefanie Mueller is an Adjunct Professor at the Institute of English and American Studies, Goethe-University Frankfurt, Germany. She is the author of The Presence of the Past in the Novels of Toni Morrison (Winter Verlag, 2013), which combines narratological analysis with the tools of figurational and relational sociology. She has also co-edited collections that present work in media and popular culture studies as well as economic criticism and literary sociology, most recently Reading the Social in American Studies (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022). She has been a visiting scholar at Harvard University, Cambridge, and the University of California, Irvine. Her current research examines US citizenship in lyric poetry and law as well as questions of scale and genre in environmental fiction and film.

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