The Corporation in the Nineteenth-Century American Imagination

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 is an Adjunct Professor at the Institute of English and American Studies, Goethe-University Frankfurt, Germany. She is the author of The Presence of the Past in the Novels of Toni Morrison (Winter Verlag, 2013), which combines narratological analysis with the tools of figurational and relational sociology. She has also co-edited collections that present work in media and popular culture studies as well as economic criticism and literary sociology, most recently Reading the Social in American Studies (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022). She has been a visiting scholar at Harvard University, Cambridge, and the University of California, Irvine. Her current research examines US citizenship in lyric poetry and law as well as questions of scale and genre in environmental fiction and film.