LAUSR

In the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century US, what did it mean, and for whom, to ground the state’s legitimacy in the consent of the governed, or to see the whole range of economic, familial, and social relationships to mirror and amplify that consensual basis? And what roles did prose fiction, particularly the novel, play in elaborating a model of legitimate rule that was tied up with contests over both politics and subjectivity? The book described in this article takes up these questions. Controversies about consent were driven by the fact that groups historically excluded from full citizenship were struggling, with mixed success, to be counted among the citizens whose consent mattered to the legitimacy of the state and its democratic life. These controversies were deepened by evolving and intersecting models of political order and psychology. Although consent was an object of legislative and juridical dispute, it was also examined in a wide-reaching vernacular discourse. Literary fiction seized on controversies about consent, using the resources of narrative form not only in directly political ways, as in advocacy for rights, but also in theoretical ways that probed the complexities of consent and its connections to social order.