About

Stacey Margolis is a Professor of English at the University of Utah. Her research focuses on intergenerational justice, particularly its cultural history and how fiction illuminates the evolution of the obligation to protect future generations. She is the author of 'The Future is Fiction: A Cultural History of Intergenerational Justice' (Oxford UP, 2026), which explores the development of the idea that living people have a responsibility to safeguard the world for those in the future, tracing its origins from the late eighteenth-century democratic revolutions to contemporary times. Her work emphasizes how fiction—from nineteenth-century utopian novels to post-nuclear dystopias and stories about endangered children—reflects and shapes the ethical dilemmas associated with intergenerational obligations. Margolis has also authored 'Fictions of Mass Democracy' (Cambridge UP, 2015), examining how nineteenth-century American fiction contributed to theories of the democratic public, and 'The Public Life of Privacy' (Duke UP, 2005), which challenges traditional views of privacy in American literary history by highlighting how writers depicted individuals through their public effects.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Art
• Law
• Literature
• Epistemology
• History
• Computer Science
• Philosophy
• Internet privacy
• Linguistics
• Aesthetics

Selected publications

• As the World Turns; or Against Methodology

  American Literary History · 2021 · 10 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Epistemology

  Abstract The last ten years have seen the rise of an astonishing number of critical “turns” designed to revitalize literary studies by highlighting the political utility of certain methodologies. This essay argues that the critical investment in the power of methodology, especially the recent commitment to reparative reading practices, derives from a misunderstanding of what methodology is and what it can do. While fiction and poetry do often have political effects, these effects cannot be produced, regulated, or directed by particular methods of interpretation.

  PublisherDOI

• The Illiberal Imagination: class and the rise of the U.S. Novel

  Nineteenth Century Contexts · 2020

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Sociology

  What role does class play in the literary history of the United States? According to Joe Shapiro's The Illiberal Imagination, recent scholarship on American fiction has sometimes occluded the exten...

  PublisherDOI

• The Innocence Project: Future Generations from the Founders to The Village

  Arizona quarterly/˜The œArizona quarterly · 2020-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  This essay explores the philosophical roots of the idea that Americans have an obligation to future generations, beginning with Thomas Jefferson’s claim that “the earth belongs in usufruct to the living.” In arguing that living people had no right to bind future people (with debts or laws they had no hand in shaping), Jefferson was making one of the earliest versions of the political claim for intergenerational justice. I then examine the way this idea reemerges in our contemporary moment—in the environmental movement, anxieties about parenting, and films, like The Village, The Truman Show, Pleasantville, WALL-E, The Witch, and Captain Fantastic, that fantasize the creation of pristine, sealed-off, pseudo-utopias. I focus throughout on The Village, because its particular version of a vexed utopia reveals not only the logic of intergenerational justice, but also its limitations.

  PublisherDOI

• The Public Life of Privacy in Nineteenth-Century American Literature

  Duke University Press eBooks · 2020

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Computer Science
  • Internet privacy

  Stacey Margolis rethinks a key chapter in American literary history, challenging the idea that nineteenth-century American culture was dominated by an ideology of privacy that defined subjects in terms of their intentions and desires. She reveals how writers from Nathaniel Hawthorne to Henry James depicted a world in which characters could only be understood-and, more importantly, could only understand themselves-through their public actions. She argues that the social issues that nineteenth-century novelists analyzed-including race, sexuality, the market, and the law-formed integral parts of a broader cultural shift toward understanding individuals not according to their feelings, desires, or intentions, but rather in light of the various inevitable traces they left on the world.Margolis provides readings of fiction by Hawthorne and James as well as Susan Warner, Mark Twain, Charles Chesnutt, and Pauline Hopkins. In these writers' works, she traces a distinctive novelistic tradition that viewed social developments-such as changes in political partisanship and childhood education and the rise of new politico-legal forms like negligence law-as means for understanding how individuals were shaped by their interactions with society. The Public Life of Privacy in Nineteenth-Century American Literature adds a new level of complexity to understandings of nineteenth-century American culture by illuminating a literary tradition full of accidents, mistakes, and unintended consequences-one in which feelings and desires were often overshadowed by all that was external to the self

  PublisherDOI

• Editors' Introduction: The Next Phase of J19

  J19 · 2018-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Editors' IntroductionThe Next Phase of J19 Stacey Margolis and Elizabeth Duquette With this issue we take on the editorship of J19. This is an exciting and intimidating task, made simultaneously easier and more daunting by the inspiring work of the journal's first editors, Dana Nelson and Chris Castiglia. In five short years, they created an influential forum for literary and cultural studies, combining long-form scholarly work with innovative features like the Pleasure Reading series and the Forums. As editors, we will honor their vision and protect their groundbreaking work, building on their success in order to guarantee the ongoing vitality of J19. Our first act as editors was to ask them to write Pleasure Reading pieces for all of us and we are delighted to include these essays in our first issue. Although disseminating and archiving scholarship is J19's most important function, we hope to develop further the journal's capacity to serve, sustain, and nurture a diverse scholarly community of nineteenth-century Americanists. To be vital, a community must allow members to speak and listen both. One way we will try to realize this goal is to offer a means of responding in print to the journal's essays. Our aim is to provide a space for the open exchange of ideas so integral to our community's thinking, writing, and teaching, and, in the process, to ensure that readers turn to J19 not only when essays happen to overlap with specific research interests. We thus encourage readers to send us questions, comments, suggestions, and alternate views; we are interested not only in responses to arguments published in J19 but also in matters of general interest to our field. At the same time, we are keenly aware that our community is not, and has never been, limited by the borders of the United States. Over the next few years, we will feature Forums organized by Americanists in [End Page vii] Europe, Asia, and South America that will, we trust, productively complicate our received notions of what scholarship in this field must look like. Our ultimate goal is to ensure that J19 reflects the cultural, intellectual, and institutional diversity of our field. These are strange and interesting times to be Americanists. We chose the image on our first cover, A View of the Terrific Explosion at the Great Fire in New York (1845), as a way of registering both the danger of these times and the energy with which we will face it. [End Page viii] Copyright © 2018 C19: The Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists

  PublisherDOI

• American Affects: Abjection, Enthusiasm, Terror

  American Literary History · 2018-01-01 · 3 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  What can the election of Donald Trump teach us about democratic publics? That democracies can be swayed by irrational impulses and the manipulation of demagogues is nothing new. James Madison worried about precisely these problems in Federalist No. 63, raising the scary possibility that voters might be their own worst enemies: “[t]here are particular moments in public affairs, when the people, stimulated by some irregular passion, or some illicit advantage, or misled by the artful misrepresentations of interested men, may call for measures which they themselves will afterwards be the most ready to lament and condemn” (320). With the exception of that last part about regret, Madison’s remarks seem eerily prescient. Less than 50 years later, both Alexis de Tocqueville and James Fenimore Cooper lamented the “tyranny of the majority”—the effect, they claimed, of America’s commitment to the rule of public opinion (Tocqueville 288).1 No: the most surprising thing about the 2016 election was precisely that the result was so surprising. The polls were wrong; the pundits were wrong. In the immediate postmortem period, Charles Davis wondered “why the political subculture that prides itself on its superior analysis of reality”—in other words, the political left—“didn’t grasp what was happening.” Whatever actually caused the surprise—the echo-chamber effect of social media, the rise of nonprofessional pollsters, the complacency of an urban elite—Trump’s election reveals that much of what counts as democratic politics happens out of sight, continually frustrating our sense that we can know or predict or manage its effects.

  PublisherDOI

• The Perversity of Public Opinion in Poe’s Later Satires and Hoaxes

  2018-07-10

  reference-entry1st authorCorresponding

  This essay argues that Poe’s late satires attempt to dramatize the power of public opinion in Jacksonian democracy, especially insofar as that opinion asserts its authority by overriding individual thought and belief. Beyond Poe’s disdain for the stupidity and malleability of popular beliefs, in other words, what haunts the strained comedy of his increasingly bitter late satires is his interest in how such beliefs acquire a seemingly uncontestable power. In these stories, public opinion is sinister because it is collective without being intentional; it emerges, but it is traceable to no will and no plan, communal or otherwise. In satires like “Mellonta Tauta” and “Some Words with a Mummy,” Poe examines the inevitably thwarted desire to stabilize meaning by tracing opinion to an original source. In “The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether,” Poe parodies the attempt to ground individual belief in something less ephemeral than collective opinion.

  PublisherDOI

• Fictions of Mass Democracy in Nineteenth-Century America

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2015-07-23 · 29 citations

  book1st authorCorresponding

  Fictions of Mass Democracy in Nineteenth-Century America examines how mass democracy was understood before public opinion could be measured by polls. It argues that fiction, in its freedom to represent what resists representation, develops the most groundbreaking theories of the democratic public. These literary accounts of democracy focus less on overt pubic action than the profound effects of everyday social encounters. This book thus departs from recent scholarship, which emphasizes the responsibilities of citizenship and the achievements of oppositional social movements. It demonstrates how novels and stories by Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Fanny Fern, Harriet Jacobs and James Fenimore Cooper attempt to understand a public organized not only by explicitly political discourse, but by informal and disorganized social networks.

  PublisherDOI

• RECENT BOOKS IN THIS SERIES (continued from page iii)

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2015-08-05

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• The People’s Curse

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2015-07-23

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  A summary is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• George Wright

  University of Lincoln

  72 shared

• Louisa Mackenzie

  University of Washington

  72 shared

• Arturo Arias

  72 shared

• Judith Butler

  72 shared

• Daniel P. Deneau

  Minnesota State University Moorhead

  72 shared

• Sidonie Smith

  72 shared

• Carl Wieck

  72 shared

• Margaret Thomas

  University of Sydney

  72 shared