...there is little denying the importance of the larger impression that each essay leaves when read as part of an interlocking whole. Upon completion the reader should leave fully convinced that the record that Smith claimed to unearth yet has many things to reveal regarding its own complexity as a literary text, as well as insights into the culture of 19th-century America.
Elizabeth Fenton is Associate Professor of English at the University of Vermont. She is the author of Religious Liberties: Anti-Catholicism and Liberal Democracy in Nineteenth-Century US Literature and Culture (Oxford, 2011).
Jared Hickman is Associate Professor of English at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of Black Prometheus: Race and Radicalism in the Age of Atlantic Slavery (Oxford, 2016) and co-editor (with Martha Schoolman) of Abolitionist Places (Routledge, 2016).