American Snobs

Emily Coit is Assistant Instructional Professor in English at the University of Chicago. She studies the history of thinking about education, citizenship, and democracy. Her work has appeared ELH, The Henry James Review, Nineteenth-Century Literature, and several edited collections. She is currently co-editing A Landscape Painter and Other Tales, a volume of short stories for the Cambridge Edition of the Complete Fiction of Henry James.

• AcknowledgementsIntroductionPart I. Cultivation After Reconstruction: Impossible Educations1. Slavery, Subjection, and Culture in Adams's Democracy and Esther2. The Education of the People in James's The Bostonians and The Princess Casamassima3. The Professor and the Mob in Wharton's The Valley of DecisionPart II. The Remnant at Harvard: Whiteness, Higher Education, and Democracy4. Universal White: Discrimination and Selection in James's American Scene5. The Tenth Mind: Adams and the Action of the Remnant6. Pure English: Wharton and the ElectConclusion: The Reign of the GenteelNotesBibliographyIndex

Coit’s book traces stories, collapses oppositions, catalogs shifting meanings of words, differentiates, contrasts, disambiguates. It thrives on conversation about broad theoretical questions, it dives into archival work through which it uncovers natural connections that have gone largely unnoticed. At the same time, its argumentation remains remarkably linear and articulate, even when most elaborate. In other words, it presents an academic practice that is not only theoretically sophisticated, widely read and informed, but also clearly articulated... [A] New Americanist enterprise at its best.