Description: Surveyors of Customs explores literature's insights into how America--its soft capitalism, its "democratized" inequality, its Americanization of power--"ticks." Joel Pfister argues that writers from Benjamin Franklin to Louise Erdrich can be read as critical "surveyors" of customs, culture, hegemony, capitalism's emotional logic, and much else.
Review Quotes: "In Surveyors of Customs, Joel Pfister makes the radical suggestion that for the past 250 years American writers have been doing cultural analysis. If you want to understand the workings of American capitalism as a system, Pfister suggests, you might begin with Franklin, Hawthorne, Wharton, and Wright. Making use of critical theory and close reading, Pfister brilliantly illuminates what he terms American literature's 'cultural-theoretical bite.'" --Robert S. Levine, author of The Lives of Frederick Douglass
"Why do Americans go along with a system in which big fish eat small fish? How have they become accustomed to structures that damage themselves and others? In a number of stunningly original re-readings, Surveyors of Customs argues that American literature can help us understand the cultural mechanisms that are at work in these processes. In its Tocquevillian scope and ambition, the book is, in more ways than one, an eye-opener. In future debates, it will be indispensible for understanding American literature as a resource of cultural analysis and national self-critique." --Winfried Fluck, co-editor of Re-Framing the Transnational Turn in American Studies"Joel Pfister has clearly read widely and re-read deeply, thought critically and passionately about the entire sweep of American literature and the ways in which it critiques the enduring structures of class, gender, race, individuality, and feeling in a capitalist democracy. In Surveyors of Customs he has produced an immensely learned, provocative, and challenging book." --John F. Kasson, author of The Little Girl Who Fought the Great Depression: Shirley Temple and 1930s America"Immersed as fully into the whole range of American literature as even the most thorough Americanists, Pfister himself acts as a 'surveyor' who can move back and forth in time and summon an impressively large amount of evidence for his thesis. Surveyors of Customs offers the richest extant account of the representation of 'soft capitalism' in American literature." --Werner Sollors, author of The Temptation of Despair: Tales of the 1940s"...carefully constructed arguments...Pfister is effective in joining theory and close readings of the texts." -Choice