Emergent Worlds

An astute, surprising, and inventive study of the experiential and aesthetic possibilities that became imaginable during moments of historical and geographical irresolution in the & long nineteenth century, as older world-systems receded before new ones cohered. In those liminal & folds, Sugden remaps oceanic geoculture through a series of richly illuminating and refreshingly original interpretations of a host of texts, canonical and understudied. Emergent Worlds is, like the worlds it examines, full of possibilities and pleasures. ~Christopher Castiglia, author of Practices of Hope (NYU Press, 2017)

Sugden has the rare gift of being able to synthesize complex conversations and formulations and then to intervene within them generously and wisely. His archive of texts is rich, bringing together an unusual grouping of authors ranging from Melville to the first Haitian novelist, Émeric Bergeaud. Emergent Worlds considers these texts as a collective & archival form that does more than merely preserve the interstitial states of emergent political thought that existed precariously in the time of their original production; it also protects a kind of seedbed for unknown futures: emergent forms of political imagining that might one day be called upon to remake a precarious world. ~Anna Brickhouse, University of Virginia

Emergent Worlds is an aspirational and counterfactual history of what might have been—and might yet emerge—within the archives of nineteenth-century American literacy and cultural study. ~Early American Literature

You feel you are reading the work of a trailblazer. ~Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies

In a book that makes forceful yet elegant interventions into conversations about the timelines of American studies and oceanic forms of relation, Sugden shows a remarkable ability to zoom among various temporal and literary scales, from the quirkily local to the global, from the canonical to the surprisingly marginalized. ~Early American Literature