The Corporate Forms of Antebellum US Literature

Abstract This book explores the antebellum legal and literary genealogy of the corporation and shows how it can illuminate contemporary confrontations with the corporate form. In the wake of the Dartmouth College decision, the corporation was recognized as a flexible and powerful form for enterprises ranging from banks to mutual aid societies to utopian communities, even as it disrupted conceptions of both natural and artificial personhood. Attending to the literary and cultural history of the corporation, this book shows how a seemingly instrumental legal category spurred reflection on human identity, mortality and immortality, slavery and freedom, and the possibilities of social and political collectivity. Antebellum American writers took on corporate personhood and reframed it as literary personification; they explored and reimagined the terms at the heart of the legal doctrine of the corporation, including artificiality, immortality, multiplicity, and succession. This book unfolds the rich and surprising corporate imaginary that constitutes the prehistory of today’s corporations even as it reveals forgotten and unrealized conceptions of personhood, politics, and collectivity.