Southworth’s The Hidden Hand, or Capitola, the Madcap (1859), in particular, exploits the uncertainty and generic indeterminacy of the story-paper form in order to dramatize the dissolution of the categories of nation and gender. 4 Serialized in a story-paper on the eve of the Civil War, E.D.E.N. Contributing to previous efforts to uncover the multivalent politics of this enormously popular print form, this essay argues that the hybridity of the antebellum story-paper operates as a register for the era’s anxieties about the breakdown of the nation as well as the gender conventions that female authorship threatened to overturn. history by the most divisive of adjectives: ‘antebellum.’” 3Īs a print form that rose to prominence during this discordant period, antebellum story-papers provide a singular point of entry into the variable and uneven relationship between print culture and nationalism in the United States. nationalism but instead ushered in the era of high sectionalism that is now marked in official U.S. nation building did not in fact lead to a golden age of U.S. She writes, “Contrary to truisms that link the production of collective affect to the existence of material institutions (from post roads to print culture), the golden age of U.S.

2 As she demonstrates, the emergence of print networks, as well as railroads and other technological routes, in the mid-nineteenth century seem to have had perhaps the inverse effect on the institution of the nation. 1 In one of the most sustained oppositions to this thesis’ applicability to the American context, Trish Loughran has recently argued that the nation dissolved at precisely the moment when mass print culture exploded.

literary culture have begun to chip away at the validity of Benedict Anderson’s longstanding, influential claim that nations (“imagined communities”) emerge out of print culture.

The hidden hand southworth