Underwriting The Poetics of Insurance in America, 1722-1872 [Hardcover]

This book focuses on the way literary texts articulate embedded cultural assumptions about monetary value and reflect the logic of certain economic practices. In its simplest formulation,Underwritingis an investigation of the cultural history of insurance in early America. It seeks a large part of that cultural history in the lives and works of five American authors of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: Benjamin Franklin, Phillis Wheatley, Noah Webster, Herman Melville, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. It hinges on an odd-sounding assumption: that insurance, as a textual procedure requiring signatures to conserve property, is a writing business, theoretically and practically. Insurance articulates a nexus (in the form of contractual and monetary obligations) between property and text, attempting to mark and reconcile with its voracious application of assurances these two cornerstones of capitalist logic. The plot ofUnderwritingthat Wertheimer pursues is then manifold: a meditation on theories of writing; a cultural and social history of the practices that make mutually defining modes of loss and reparation profitable and pleasurable; and a reading of certain literary texts that might lead us to new understandings of the relationship between artistic and commercial discourses in America.This book is about the historical influence insurance has had on American culture.Eric Wertheimer is Associate Professor of American Literature at Arizona State University. He is also the author ofImagined Empires: Incas, Aztecs, and the New World of American Literature, 1771-1876(1998). Underwritingis a book of genuine intellectual ambition that brings together a range of historical materials, critical methodologies, and literary texts, yet it does all of this with such care and intelligence that nearly every page is compelling. There is much to admire in this genuine contribution to our ongoing appraisal of key figures in American literary history. WelsŠ