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.
*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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