Caleb Smith is Professor of English and American Studies at Yale University.
In The Oracle and the Curse, Smith traces the
remarkable changes in literary and judicial discourses that
addressed (or conjured) a variety of public spheres and forms of
authority during the period between the American Revolution and the
Civil War. As the secularization of law took hold, judges spoke as
oracles of a transcendent rationality and social order, thus
commanding obedience. In court testimonies, pamphlets, poems, and
novels, however, voices of resistance responded with justifications
derived from higher laws. Figures such as John Brown cursed the
tribunals of the state and its oracles. Reformers who saw the
danger in their fanaticism and tried to regulate such speech,
however, did not always welcome their enthusiasm. Meanwhile, a
doctrine of separate public versus private spheres led women
writers such as Harriet Beecher Stowe to enunciate an alternative
discourse of intimate influence whose purported limitation to the
private sphere was a mask enabling very public acts of social and
political critique. Smith shows how much is at stake in these
controversies. He does so through fascinating and wide-ranging
examples drawn from legal cases and popular literature, crafting a
thoroughly researched, persuasive study that is original and
important. -- G. Jay * Choice *
In The Oracle and the Curse, Caleb Smith draws on an
impressive range of resources, from legal treatises to execution
sermons, criminal confessions, death sentences, blasphemy trials,
debates over women's preaching, and the agonizing self-policing of
both conservative divines and radical abolitionists, weaving into
his account insightful treatments of literary works such as
Elizabeth Barrett Browning's "Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point" and
Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. A strikingly
original and beautifully--even masterfully--written account of
large-scale shifts in antebellum Americans' understanding of the
grounds of legitimacy of the law. -- Meredith McGill, Rutgers
University
Caleb Smith has composed a highly-original critical
genealogy of the conflict between human law and higher law and of
the nineteenth-century juridical public sphere in which it was
waged. The Oracle and the Curse is sure to become an
interdisciplinary classic. -- Donald Pease, Dartmouth College
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