The Corporation in the Nineteenth-Century American Imagination
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Edinburgh University Press
Published:13th Dec '22
Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back
Examines the way the corporation – a legal concept of enduring and timely importance in the Anglo-American legal tradition – was imagined in the nineteenth-century historical imagination. Stefanie Mueller traces the ways in which literary and cultural representations of the corporation in nineteenth-century America helped shift how the corporation was envisioned; from a public tool meant to serve the common good, to an instrument of private enterprise. She explores how artists and writers together with lawyers and economists represented this transformation through narrative and metaphor. Drawing on a range of legal, literary and visual texts, she shows how the corporation’s public origins as well as its fundamentally collective nature continued to be relevant much longer than previous scholarship has argued.
Stefanie Mueller’s engaging and insightful The Corporation in the Nineteenth-Century American Imagination offers compelling answers to [...] complex questions and profound insights on the history of liberal individualism, literary culture, and corporate power in the United States. -- Kevin Musgrave * The New Rambler *
Stefanie Mueller’s engaging and insightful The Corporation in the Nineteenth-Century American Imagination offers compelling answers to [...] complex questions and profound insights on the history of liberal individualism, literary culture, and corporate power in the United States. -- Kevin Musgrave * The New Rambler *
Mueller’s critique has never been more important—the omnipotent, immortal corporation brings not just worry about Citizens United and the speaking dollar, but also the prospect of the corporate maw feeding itself and metastasizing in unprecedented ways; we are faced with artificial intelligence and even artificial neural networks, as well as the material and intellectual consumption of global archives and resources by that voracious artificial mouth. Mueller’s cultural history offers critical vocabulary essential to understanding and countering the quickly approaching event horizon that corporate artificial intelligence portends—the offloading of corporal being and so-called thinking onto computer networks while national collectivities, at all levels and in all forms, fail to stop it. -- Eric Wertheimer * The American Literary History Review *
ISBN: 9781399505000
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
224 pages