The Letter and the Spirit of Nineteenth-Century American Literature: Justice, Politics, and Theology (review)

Reviewed by: The Letter and the Spirit of Nineteenth-Century American Literature: Justice, Politics, and Theology Jeannine Marie DeLombard (bio) Thomas Loebel. The Letter and the Spirit of Nineteenth-Century American Literature: Justice, Politics, and Theology McGill-Queen’s University Press. viii, 296. $75.00 Questions of justice and religion with respect to politics in nineteenth-century American literature have been thoroughly canvassed over the past thirty years. At the centre of much of this discussion has been Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), with its portrayal of slavery as occurring 'beneath the shadow of American law, and the shadow of the cross of Christ.' Given that the critical reassessment of Stowe coincided [End Page 447] with the emergence of what used to be the 'New' Historicism, this work has been largely historicist in methodology, excavating the legal, philosophical, theological, print, and material contexts for America's first international bestseller. Originally conceived as yet another inquiry into Stowe's intervention into antebellum legal and literary debates over race and rights, The Spirit and the Letter is distinguished by Thomas Loebel's interest in the language in which such interventions are accomplished. Committed to 'a rethinking of language from a theological perspective and the effects of its indwelling in the literary,' Loebel is less concerned with how early American authors from Mary Rowlandson to Nathaniel Hawthorne to George Washington Cable represent questions of justice than how justice is 'manifest' in their language itself. Hence the titular attention to the Pauline distinction between the Old Testament observance of the letter of the law and the New Testament emphasis on the spirit for salvation. 'A theological conception of language argues for ethics as the fundamental constitution of language as such,' Loebel explains: 'The Word is created as the relation to the inassimilable Other. Wholly constitutive of human language, Word persecutes the attempts of human language to represent in-justice to the others of this world.' As Loebel's own language suggests, his inquiry's linguistic orientation prompts a deconstructive approach. The Apostle Paul and Emmanuel Levinas, rather than Adam Smith and Michel Foucault, provide the study's theoretical underpinnings. The result, as Loebel acknowledges, is not entirely reader-friendly: the different chapters 'set various plates spinning at the same time ... whose simultaneity print does not facilitate best,' each chapter developing 'aspects of the overall idea, which takes shape, and only in the sense of an outline, in the conclusion.' Indeed, it is difficult to summarize a coherent argument holding these chapters together. Loebel's overarching concern is the tension between 'unionist-republican' and 'confederate-democratic' visions of American identity, in the sense of federalist versus more pluralistic views of nationhood. Loebel posits the latter, detached from its sectional association with a white supremacist states-rights platform, as a means for resisting a hegemonic American identity that, subsuming the cultural under the national, wilfully disregards otherness and difference. The study's various strains come together most productively in Loebel's convincing demonstration of how Cable's well-intentioned realist use of local colour writing in The Grandissimes (1880) fails in its goal of manifesting the Other's linguistic and cultural integrity in that dialect ultimately records only the writing self's perception of difference. Ironically, the study's inconsistent interaction with its own critical 'others' detracts from its overall effectiveness. If, in chapters on Anne [End Page 448] Hutchinson and Mary Rowlandson, one might wish for more of Loebel's original insights and less deference to scholars of Puritan literature and culture, the otherwise careful readings in the two chapters on Stowe suffer from a lack of engagement with other critics, some of them quite influential. It seems odd, for example, that chapter 5's discussion of the Exodus story in antebellum 'African American liberation discourse' makes no mention of Eddie S. Glaude, Jr,'s Exodus! Religion, Race, and Nation in Early Nineteenth-Century Black America (2002). Similarly, one wonders why, when Loebel argues, quite persuasively, that Stowe recuperates the Old Testament 'to promote the concept that sentiment and love are only as useful as the material ethical action they motivate,' he does not take into account legal scholar Alfred L...

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