on American Fragments

Michael Soriano (MS): Daniel, thank you for joining us. Let's start with the first question: how did this project begin for you, and how did writing the book differ from the dissertation?

Daniel Couch (DC): Thank you. And genuinely, these are some of the best questions I've been asked about this book. It's clear you gave it real attention.

The project started early in graduate school, though I didn't know it at the time. It actually began with chapter three: the chapter on seduction novels, specifically The Coquette. I was TAing a course and asked to give a guest lecture on it. I wrote out this big lecture, which pushed me to write a seminar paper, which I eventually published as an article in EAL.

While working on that article, I was also developing a dissertation, but a completely different one, nothing to do with literary fragments. I did something I wouldn't necessarily recommend, but which worked out: I switched dissertation topics after writing a prospectus. I kept coming back to The Coquette and this idea of fragments, and I finally wanted to see if the idea had legs. My dissertation director, Christopher Luby, was remarkably supportive. I don't know that every director would say "let's change topics after a year," but he was behind it completely.

As for the difference between the dissertation and the book—and I think this varies person to person, though I've heard others say something similar—the dissertation, looking back, was several chapters connected by a single idea but without a strong narrative running through the whole thing. The revision process was really about asking: how do we move from point A to point B? How does that movement get integrated into each chapter? In a way, it's a larger version of what we teach students in writing: you want each paragraph to relate to the next without simply repeating the same idea. Same principle, just at a much bigger scale.

MS: As someone in the middle of writing my dissertation, I can say that finding the narrative thread is genuinely hard. My advisor actually told me not to worry about it until the book.

DC: Right. For me, it took months, if not years, to figure out. Maybe it comes faster for some people, but not for me.

MS: The next question came out of the three of us reading your bio and thinking about your trajectory. How did your path from UCLA to the Air Force Academy influence your perspective on the fragment and the interplay between politics and aesthetics? You can take that wherever you want: how specific people shaped your thinking, or how the transition from dissertating to full-time faculty shaped the work.

DC: Probably the biggest institutional influence on the move from dissertation to book was my last year of the PhD, when I had a dissertation fellowship at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies in Philadelphia. It's primarily a historical center, but deeply interdisciplinary, and my project has a real historical basis, so it was formative. It pushed me to dig into the historical roots of the fragment. It was also a transitional moment: I was out on my own a bit more, developing my own scholarly voice. I think that's where the book's narrative really started to come together. Part of developing that narrative is just having the knowledge and confidence to stake a position in the field—to track a movement in your topic and commit to it.

The following year, I had a postdoc at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, which was also invaluable. Being in an institute with people at a similar stage, working through similar problems, that kind of institutional grounding matters. We all find our scholarly communities, but there's something specific about a workshop or reading group where everyone is thinking about the same set of questions.

MS: You mentioned chapter three beginning as a lecture, which makes me curious how the book has fed back into your teaching. How has this research shaped your classroom, and how do students engage with the material?

DC: Funny enough, I don't teach that many texts from the book directly. I regularly teach The Coquette and Charlotte Temple, but not Edgar Huntly as much. A lot of the material I examine—pamphlets, essays, short poems, things published in periodicals and newspapers—felt a bit self-indulgent to build a whole syllabus around. So I've tried to incorporate the more canonical texts instead.

My work on Charlotte Temple and The Coquette definitely shapes how I teach them. But we don't have graduate students here, and most of my students need an introductory grounding in early American literature, so I calibrate accordingly.

The one thing I do bring directly from the book into my teaching is archival work. I did a lot of digital and physical archival research, and I incorporate that pretty significantly. We spend time learning to use the American Periodical Series, American newspapers, and the Evans Bibliography. I try to get their feet muddy with those resources.

Emma Thiébaut (ET): This is a more practical question, but an important one, especially as more PhD students go without funding. What kinds of funding supported your project, both during the dissertation and the book, and how did it shape your process?

DC: I mentioned the McNeil fellowship and the postdoc, but let me fill in the gap between them. The McNeil was my last year of the PhD and my first year on the job market. I applied to postdocs and eventually got the American Academy position, but I didn't find out until March, so for most of that year, I had no idea what came next.

My backup plan was a slate of library and archive grants: the American Philosophical Society, the Library Company of Philadelphia, Special Collections at UVA—mostly one- to two-month fellowships. Part of that was economic survival, but it ended up enriching my scholarship significantly. I got a few of them, and being able to work directly in those physical special collections and archives gave the research a depth it wouldn't otherwise have had.

Mostly over the summers, I had to work in special collections, libraries, and archives, and weave that into the project. The Library Company in Philadelphia, the American Philosophical Society, the University of Virginia Special Collections, the Huntington, and the Antiquarian Society. Those were the most influential institutional supports the book received.

ET: That ties into my next question, actually. How did you position yourself on the job market? I was particularly interested because your book, like a lot of work in 18th- and 19th-century American studies, sits between history and literature. Was that an advantage? Did you have to choose a lane?

DC: When I was bringing this project to the market, I emphasized its methodological approach, which is largely historical and specifically book-historical. I leaned on its engagement with material textuality, the fragment as a visual and print-based form that authors and printers were experimenting with. I can only speak from my own experience, but in my documents and interviews, I framed it as a project grounded in literature with openings into other scholarly conversations. That framing also mattered when talking with publishers, who think seriously about audiences and how a book cultivates them.

MS: The three of us were interested in demystifying the process of selecting a publisher. How does it work? Were you considering multiple publishers at once?

DC: This is important, and I think it's one of those things nobody tells you. When you're writing a dissertation, you have tremendous support: your director, other grad students. When you're writing a book, unless you're at an institution with a real infrastructure for this, you're largely on your own. There's so much guidance on peer review, on where to submit articles. But the book felt, at least to me, like an amorphous process I had to piece together. I was fortunate to have a senior colleague, Gregory Lasky, who walked me through it. Even with that mentorship, it was a real learning curve.

So, to actually answer your question: I approached multiple publishers, but throughout the revision process, I had consistently envisioned this as a Penn book. Thinking about Penn shaped the project—it pushed the book toward the strong material-historical grounding that characterizes a lot of their 19th-century list. I'd even say that having a publisher in mind helped shape the book's narrative and methodology.

That said, I'd encourage anyone to talk to multiple editors. Some of the feedback I got from editors at other presses was genuinely valuable, and I incorporated it. It also gave me a clearer sense of how editors think about acquisitions and what they're looking for in a list.

MS: And what does the actual process look like, mechanically?

DC: I reached out to five editors with short emails. One paragraph, essentially: "Here's what I'm working on. Would you be interested in meeting at MLA or over Zoom?" Two of the five responded with polite passes. Three were interested. Two wanted meetings; one just wanted a proposal and a sample chapter. After those meetings, once an editor is committing time and a reader to your manuscript, the general understanding is that you're working exclusively with that press. But don't close doors prematurely. Reader reports can be difficult. Things don't always work out, and you may need to go elsewhere. Keep other relationships warm.

MS: Did any editor's input actually change how you thought about the book?

DC: My editor at Penn, Jerry Singerman, was excellent, deeply devoted to the work, very methodical. After the proposal and an MLA meeting, I sent him the introduction and a sample chapter, which he reviewed and gave notes on. But the real guidance came through the reader reports. I received two, and for each, we had a phone call where he walked me through what to prioritize in revision and how to approach the feedback. It was substantive support, not just on the intellectual content, but on the process itself.

MS: The editor is such an invisible part of the labor that produces these books. You see the author's name on the cover, and that stands for the whole journey. But a good editor is arguably essential to getting a book to print.

DC: You want someone who's on the project's team, and on yours.

Lise Chenal (LC): I wanted to ask about the illustrations. I thought they really anchored your argument, and I found myself turning back to them throughout the book. What guided your selection? And how did you navigate the practical constraints: copyright, permissions, and whether a special collection would allow use of a specific image?

DC: I definitely wanted images. There are moments in the book when something about the fragment's visual representation on the page is too significant to describe in prose alone. One of the scholars I cite, Bonnie Mack, talks about the architecture of the page—the visual schematic that has its own relationship to the text. Each chapter has some form of print-based visual analysis.

In terms of how many images to include, I looked at comparable studies—ones published by Penn, others by different presses—to get a sense of the range. For a non-art-historical study, five to ten seemed standard, partly because more images mean higher production costs for the press and for you.

For most of the images in this book, there was no copyright fee. They're 18th- and 19th-century works, so they're in the public domain. The cost was in obtaining a high-resolution image from the archive: they have to pull the physical book, photograph it properly, and process the file. Different institutions charge differently for that, and you can shop around. The one image I got free was the cover, from the American Antiquarian Society. They already had a usable high-resolution file. Usually, the cover image carries a higher fee, so that was a lucky exception.

ET: I've been noticing books lately that put supplemental image libraries online, sometimes hosted by universities, rather than including everything in print. Ephemeral Bibelots by Brad Evans is one example. Did you consider that?

DC: I hadn't even known about it. You've just told me something wonderful that I'm going to look into today. It's a great idea. My one concern is that publishers might use it as a reason to reduce images in the book itself: "You can just make a website." If a book needs images, it should have them. The website should extend the book, not substitute for it. I'd also be wary of presses shifting the burden for visuals onto authors, and I could see that happening, given how tightly university presses have to budget.

LC: There's also the question of what happens when the website disappears. I remember a scholar who had made supplemental resources available through the Henry David Thoreau Society's website, and by the time I read the book, they were gone. It was genuinely frustrating. Maybe someday QR codes embedded in the text will link directly to institutional special collections and solve the problem.

DC: Yes, especially for full-resolution color material.

MS: I can speak to this personally. I scanned images from a periodical I'm using for the dissertation, and I'm putting them online, but I'm paying for the site myself. There wasn't going to be institutional funding for that kind of archival work, at least not at my stage. Paying out of pocket is often the only alternative.

If you had to start this whole process over, what advice would you give yourself? Were there challenges you hadn't anticipated?

DC: The biggest challenge I hadn't anticipated was shaping the book's narrative and identifying its audience. People say this constantly during the dissertation, and I heard it a hundred times, but it only clicked once I'd actually written the book. During the dissertation, you're writing for three to five people who know your work intimately. The book asks you to slow down, introduce readers to the concept from the beginning, and use narrative to make the case for why this topic matters. That's genuinely hard intellectual labor. It's tied to your methodology: if the project is historical, how are you showing change over time? If it's theoretical, why does the argument develop the way it does from one chapter to the next?

That's what I'd tell my younger self, though I don't actually have to travel back in time, because I'm working on a second project now and it's almost as hard as the first. You know the challenge is coming, but knowing doesn't make the actual figuring-out any easier.

The last thing I'd add: don't put too much pressure on yourself early. The narrative is something you can only see once you've drafted the whole thing.

LC: I was struck by your discussion of Emerson's “optative mood” and the “sense of democratic possibility” the fragment can convey. And I found it interesting to set that against The Federalist, which argues against political and organizational fragmentation at precisely the moment of constitutional debate. The essay is being used to argue against fragmentation, perhaps because it's a different kind of essay, or because the genre is still evolving. Could you say more about how the essay intersects with the fragment?

DC: It's an interesting tension, and I think you've put your finger on something that was lurking just below the surface of the book. In the first chapter, when I trace the European history of fragmentary forms, I mention Montaigne and peripatetic essays, but I don't connect that essayistic tradition to The Federalist directly. Early American newspapers are saturated with partial forms: articles flagged for continuation in the next issue, tidbits dropped in beside longer pieces, things literally labeled “fragment” or “anecdote.” Madison is writing in those same publications while making an argument for federal unity. And The Federalist itself has a fascinating formal ambivalence: it's a collaborative work by multiple authors presenting themselves as a single allegorical voice under the name Publius. That's not an answer, but your question opened up a lot of thoughts.

The book I see as most closely aligned with mine—Matthew Garrett's Episodic Poetics, on the episode in post-Constitutional literature—has a whole chapter on The Federalist Papers that addresses exactly this tension. As I recall, Garrett reads the federalist impulse toward unification alongside the fact that the writing project itself is deeply informed by what he calls episodic logic, and what I'd call fragmentary logic. That's without even getting to Emerson, who, at earlier stages of this project, I seriously considered giving his own chapter, given how his essayistic style is perpetually open-ended and forward-reaching.

LC: I'll seek out that Garrett chapter. Thank you.

ET: I want to ask a mildly critical question. I come to fragments as a generalist rather than a specialist.

DC: So you're the audience.

ET: Exactly. When I read your argument about the European tradition of fragments as a mostly progressive form that opens space for marginal voices, I wasn't sure it held across all European fragments. It reminded me of Travis Foster's work on genre and Reconstruction, where he argues that plantation literature is largely conservative, oriented toward white reconciliation, but also that genre isn't inherently political. It's a tool that can be weaponized in either direction. Have you encountered arguments like that since the book appeared, and has it shifted your thinking?

DC: Certain formal features of the fragment are always in play—the tension between part and whole, for instance. Those are genuinely inherent, regardless of when or where a fragment is published. But I agree: form doesn't determine political direction. I do think certain forms carry particular cultural valences at particular historical moments—the Gothic's focus on the past might make it more available for conservative uses at certain points, though I wouldn't claim that's fixed. What the book tries to show is that the fragment's progressive valence isn't permanent. By the end of the period I examine, the fragment has largely shed its political emphasis and become more bound up with authorial identity and literary prestige. So the politics of form are real but contingent: historically situated rather than structurally determined. That's a debate a lot of people are having in the field right now, and I think your question goes to the heart of it.

MS: Picking up on that, since I work on seriality, your book gave me a lot to think about in terms of form and politics. There's a line in the book about the fragment's “progressive potential for change” being tied to narrative structure, and the acknowledgment that it didn't develop solely for the benefit of the marginalized. My question is about the contemporary resonances. The fragment is now everywhere: YouTube Shorts, TikTok, Instagram Reels, information silos, and the collapse of shared narrative. If fragmentation can be read as politically regressive in that context, how do you think your analysis of the early American fragment connects, or doesn’t, to this broader cultural moment?

DC: Early in the revision process, I drew a line between the fragment as a deliberate, self-conscious form—authors labeling their work a “fragment,” carving out a specific generic space—and fragmentation as a diffuse aesthetic that shows up everywhere in modernist writing and contemporary media. My primary focus was the former. By the end of the book, I do start tracing the turn toward fragmentation as style, and I'd argue that the aesthetic emerges partly from the form, not only in the United States but through the British Romantics: Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Byron.

Your Twitter example is useful. Twitter was central to the Arab Spring, helping coordinate uprising movements across borders. It's also a primary engine of disinformation and political division. The political effects of a form depend heavily on who is using it and how. In the period I'm examining, the people most visibly deploying the fragment are largely white bourgeois writers using it to distinguish themselves from figures they label as “fragments,” while simultaneously searching for a progressive narrative through those same figures. That doesn't do justice to the full scope of your question, but it's a starting point.

MS: My last content question is on Charles Brockden Brown and Edgar Huntly. I was fascinated by your reading of sleepwalking, both as a thematic focus and as a compositional principle. How did you arrive at that?

DC: I'm a total evangelist for Brockden Brown. I'm teaching Wieland right now in a course on the American Gothic, and the first class ended with a character spontaneously combusting. I think he's just remarkable. What I find so interesting about Brown is that he takes an idea he's working through and folds it into his aesthetic style. He's reading British radicals—Godwin and others—engaging with a vibrant intellectual scene in New York, but he's also working at a moment when the early American novel is still figuring itself out. He leans hard into that openness. Rather than starting from an established aesthetic principle, he seems to ask: what would it look like to take this thematic idea and formalize it? With Arthur Mervyn, he tracks the spread of yellow fever as a kind of network novel, shuttling Arthur through overlapping circles of connection. With sleepwalking in Edgar Huntly, the physiology becomes the aesthetic. Other scholars have done the deeper theoretical work on this—I was building on them—but the central insight is that Brown doesn't separate theme from form.

LC: My last question is probably the most specific. I loved the moments where your book touches on intellectual history: the observation that 18th-century scholars recovering fragmentary texts from Antiquity influenced how contemporaries wrote and experienced the fragment is genuinely fascinating. I found myself thinking about the rise of German Higher Criticism in the mid-19th century, which revealed that foundational texts, including religious ones, were composite, assembled from multiple authors over time. Did that historical development have any bearing on how the fragment was experienced as a form?

DC: I think it absolutely must have, and I wish you'd asked me five years ago so I could have worked it into the book. My knowledge of Higher Criticism is mostly through the history of secularism, but the connection feels right. You have Romantic-era authors—Irving, Hawthorne—who are investing in the fragment as part of their authorial identity, and simultaneously, you have Higher Criticism uncovering a biblical and historical past that is itself fundamentally partial: multiple authors, assembled over centuries, producing what had been understood as unified texts. There's something to that convergence.

Your comment also makes me think of a wonderful article by the German scholar Cornelia Vismann, “The Love of Ruins.” Vismann argues that in the 18th century, historical evidence was valued for its wholeness: you wanted the complete sword, the intact book, the full artifact. Her argument is that ruins and relics began to acquire genuine historical value in the early 19th century precisely because their partiality is evidence of historical process: you can see the ruination, the passage of time. That doesn't map directly onto Higher Criticism, but I think Higher Criticism is doing something related: reintroducing the idea of partiality and showing that it was always already there, embedded in texts we assumed were whole.