Poetry and the time of labor in the antebellum US

“Poetry and the Time of Labor in the Antebellum US” argues that nineteenth-century poetic genres, forms, and social practices give us unexpected insights into how workers and reformers understood shifting conditions during early industrialization, a transformational period spanning the 1830s through the 1850s that saw changes in how Americans thought about the place and nature of work. The dissertation examines poetic production within and about three variations on a type of experimental antebellum workplace or total institution—the navy frigate, Lowell factory system, and Brook Farm utopian agrarian commune—where laborers both lived and worked, under a unity of authority, place, and time. Poetry is an important, largely unexamined part of the story of these spaces not only because poems were well used by laborers in the places where they worked, but because of the many ways that nineteenth-century poetic genres and forms both represent and reproduce the time of labor. If time-discipline is a staple of worker productivity in a capitalist system, the poems at the center of this study work against such chrononormativity. As such, they reveal the ways that the total work institutions, poised somewhere between nineteenth-century ideas of home and what we now think of as a workplace—while in ways coercive and exploitative—also enabled nonnormative counter cultures and thus can be seen as part of a genealogy of resistance to heteronormativity, gendered labor, consanguine kinship, the sex-gender hierarchies of the middle-class family, and industrial capitalism.Ph.D.Includes bibliographical reference