Table of Contents

Introduction: Reading the Episode in the Early Republic
The Episode between Part and Whole
Telemachus's Doubt: Toward a Theory of Episodic Poetics
The Whole against the Parts: Narrative Theory
From Event to Episode: Historical Poetics
The Hillock and the Mountain


Chapter One: The Poetics of Constitutional Consolidation
Complexity and Consolidation: Out of Many, One
Common and Finer: The Legacy of 1787-88
The Chain of Reading: Commerce, Episodic Poetics, Politics
Hierarchy and Literary Form 1: Commerce and Contagion
Hierarchy and Literary Form 2: Governing the Splintered Society
Hierarchy and Literary Form 3: Faction as Form
Mercantile Time and the Periodical Plot
Debt and the Rhythm of Exchange
Unreadability and Nationalism's Chain of Reading

Chapter Two: The Life in Episodes
Structure and Dispersion
Erratum and Episode: Duration and Narrative Binding
Character and Competition, Success and Failure
Society, Mischief, and the Episode
Experience, Selection, and Narrative Unity

Chapter Three: The Fiction of Hesitation
Reading the Episode in the Novel
Adventure and Didacticism
Incipits and the Incitement to Reading: From Clarissa to Constantia
Against the Episode: Morality and Form in the Literary Market
Nothing Happens
Endless Prolixity
Episode versus Futurity
Episode and Ideology

Chapter Four: Miscellany and the Structure of Style
Commodity Writing
Whim-Whams on the Market
Criticism and the Work of the Writer
Salmagundi: An Arthrology of the Literary Miscellany
The Rejection of Reference
Volubility and Formal Compromise

Appendix to Chapter Four: Table of Contents and Collation of Salmagundi
Conclusion
Works Cited
Index

About the Author

Matthew Garrett is Assistant Professor of English and American Studies at Wesleyan University.

Reviews

"The book's theoretical commitments bear special mention because they mark its relatively unique relationship to ongoing debates about historicism and literary form. Episodic Poetics is part of the resurgence of new scholarship on aesthetics, but Marxist criticism has not been particularly popular in this work, which has tended to identify Marxism (via Jameson) with the mandates of historical contextualization. And yet, perhaps for this very
reason, the book's engagement with a range of older formalisms moves it toward a newly flexible, structural account of the form of politics." --Carrie Hyde, American Literature
"For Garrett, literary form is both a reflection of and engagement with social practices. Texts simultaneously represent and 'make' history. Garrett reads these particular works as symbols of the factionlism, unrest, and divisions within the early republic." --New England Quarterly
"Garrett's book is learned and imaginatively expansive, and I took great pleasure in following him as he navigated discussions of Russian formalism, analyses of eighteenth-century business manuals, close readings of The Odyssey, examinations of the aesthetic theories of Lord Kames and Hugh Blair, a consideration of Roland Barthes's distinction between cardinal and catalytic functions-to identify only some of the literary avenues through which he guides
us. ...[A] delightful exercise in reading episodically." --Modern Philology
"Matthew Garrett's extraordinary Episodic Poetics: Politics and Literary Form After the Constitution explores the complex textures that resulted when the post-constitutional moment's consolidating energies found verbal expression in the fragmentary form of the period's literary production. ... The representative texts of Garrett's four genres, via their respective logics of contagion, error, hesitation, and volubility helped delineate the contours of
the political. Episodic Poetics' investigation of these dynamics is as theoretically sophisticated as it is elegantly constructed, and in what follows I can only gesture at the readerly pleasures that attend
following the involutions of its nuanced argument." --Common-place: The Interactive Journal of Early American Life
"How did pluribus become unum in the early United States? Matthew Garrett's Episodic Poetics reveals that the formal problem of integrating and consolidating parts into a whole connected politics with literature in the early republic. Focusing on the serialization of political tracts, the organization of events in autobiography, and the marketing of digressive fictions, Garrett makes a provocative case for the history of literary form as an integral
part of political history." --Eric Slauter, author of The State as a Work of Art: The Cultural Origins of the Constitution
"Episodic Poetics is an innovative, learned, challenging account of the politics of form and the form of politics in the early Republic. Garrett makes a persuasive case that narrative plotting is key to understanding both the richness of early national writing and the ideological contradictions of U.S. nation formation." --Edward Cahill, author of Liberty of the Imagination: Aesthetic Theory, Literary Form, and Politics in the Early United
States
"A powerful, unexpected new roadmap to the culture of the early republic. In Garrett's hands, literary form becomes the place where theory and history meet to tell a new story about a tired corner of American culture. A maverick and often beautiful book that resets the table for early Americanists." --Trish Loughran, author of The Republic in Print: Print Culture in the Age of U.S. Nation Building, 1770-1870
"In this erudite study, Garrett resuscitates the episode--a distinct diversion from the causal mechanics of plot--as a central political and literary device in the decades following the composition of the US Constitution. A meticulous literary scholar, he explores the workings of the episode as a formal device by which writers articulated variously the unsteady dialectical relationship between local and national, heterogeneous and homogeneous... Recommended."
--CHOICE
"Matthew Garret's Episodic Poetics: Politics and Literary Form after the Constitution (2014), examines...the sub-generic feature of the "episode." Bringing this often overlooked narrative unit to the forefront allows Garrett to examine works from the early American Republic, not only revealing unexpected connections and resonances but also shedding
light on formal aspects of Early Republic literature--such as the loose and seemingly rambling plots of Charles Brockden Brown's gothic novels--that have long puzzled readers." -- Eighteenth Century Fiction