In the context of current reframings of “American literature” as largely “world literature,” any project that announces itself as concerned with the literature of America – no, something even more distinctive, Philadelphia – might be accused of the most arrant exceptionalism. Yet Samuel Otter has leapt to the van of a critical passion for the local, not as a return to quaint regionalism but as a fresh consideration of place. By focussing on a city and literature that have received little attention, Otter's brilliant book shows us how to think anew about place as a nexus of history, politics, race, and class; of letters, cartoons, silhouette portraits, and book covers; of epidemics, manners, riots, and a continuing struggle over the terms and conditions of a strange thing called “freedom” – and at the center of it all, Frank J. Webb's The Garies and Their Friends (1857), Otter's quintessential Philadelphia story and itself a literary “place” of extraordinary complexity.

Otter sees Philadelphia as particularly preoccupied from its early years with an “experiment in freedom” (3), and he seems to be conducting an experiment of his own: to define an aesthetic for this varied literature of social conflict. Although both the city and its literature, he explains, grow up within a logical grid of spatial and social coordinates, they engender a “kind of excess, produced not by antithesis and absence but by the demands of freedom” (17). Otter seems fascinated by that excess, by its “strangeness,” its “extravagance,” its “peculiar” resonances, as he repeatedly points out. In his patient consideration of plague narratives, illustrations of the burning of Pennsylvania Hall (associated with abolition and reform), stories of metempsychotic travel, and particularly the mysterious pleasures of Webb's unstable and disturbing novel, Otter seems drawn to an aesthetic of urban baroque quite at odds with the predictable features of American pastoral, romantic, or realist literature. To understand The Garies and Their Friends requires not only a rich background in local history, politics, and popular culture, he makes clear, but also senses tuned to unsettling discords in the city's voices and visions.

In line with his construction of Philadelphia as an urban grid within which violent and unexpected events erupt, careen, and threaten to break the geometric frame, Otter creates a grid of his own – a four-sided figure, each side a thematic chapter: “Fever,” “Manners,” “Riot,” and “Freedom.” Within that firm structure and his lucid and beautiful prose many surprising elements compete and collide. A discussion of Henry James's American Scene on the same page as George Lippard's The Quaker City? A reading of Herman Melville's Benito Cereno as staging the same uneasy intimacies and disruptions as Webb's book? A leap forward to the MOVE bombing of 1985 and John Wideman's novels about Philadephia's racial conflicts? All participate in a literature of “surfeit” that Otter sees as identifying the “unsettled boundaries between freedom and slavery, the exposure of character under threat, the scrutiny of evidence, the depth of surfaces” (268).

Otter sees Philadelphia as producing a literature of freedom (even if freedom does not extend equally to all) in an American landscape where a literature of slavery seems more often the norm. He warns the literary critic “who may be led astray by [the] apparent symmetry and congruence” of any theoretical or thematic grid, “The literature of Philadelphia cautions against elevating the local, or reducing it to the national or the global, or folding text into context, or converting past into present.” Deftly casting into ironic relief the critical trends of a new century, Otter argues for a “literature of recalcitrance and surprise” (286), one that resists the legibility of place. In his passionate plea for recognition of the continuing strangeness of America's freedoms, Otter locates the “national” within the very places where it is most contested. This unexpected and subversive perspective, besides producing a superb and subtle reading of The Garies, also reorients our field toward new cities, new texts, new aesthetic experiments.