Introduction Bureaucratic Vistas

Abstract

This chapter sheds new light on the US Gilded Age (roughly the final three decades of the nineteenth century), revealing it—and its literature—to be a period defined as much by cynicism about corruption as by actual political venality. It sets out three of the book’s overarching interventions: first, calling us to expand our vocabulary of “political emotion” beyond sympathy to a wider range of disagreeable and in-between feelings; second, providing frameworks for analyzing the relation, rather than the opposition, between reason and emotion in political contexts (in particular, via the affective tenor of late-nineteenth-century bureaucratic discourse); third, claiming that we must supplement accounts of nineteenth-century US literature’s utopian moods with a view of those quotidian feelings—so often negative—that define encounters with existing political institutions, as foregrounded by Gilded Age fiction. Authors discussed include Frances Hodgson Burnett, Herman Melville, Mark Twain, and Walt Whitman.