Michael Collins's The Drama of the American Short Story, 1800–1865 makes a compelling case for revisiting the well-trodden ground of short fiction by Washington Irving, Edgar Allen Poe, Herman Melville, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. The book's premise – that transatlantic exchange and the era's theater shaped short fiction – generates fresh readings of the genre's politics in a clear, engaging style. Whereas short fiction's particular attention to form might seem to imply its conservatism (24), Collins notes that the genre faced critical neglect for its very refusal to stabilize a coherent US national identity. To explain why the form proves unsettling, he argues that its writers often engage with performance culture (via reference to theater's tropes, controversies, and actors) and thereby highlight how American identity emerges through ritualized transatlantic encounters. Rather than simply taking sides in partisan class tensions that erupted in early American theater, these stories critique both the detached, Romantic spectator associated with elitist Anglophilia and the carnivalesque mass culture of the US marketplace. Further, Collins contends that writers explore how Americans might learn to perform rituals that promise to foster cross-class bonds. His study thereby offers a persuasive interpretation of short fiction that demonstrates how burgeoning work in performance studies enriches our understanding of prose.

In each chapter, Collins theorizes how writers blur a particular cultural/national division. Chapter 1 argues that Washington Irving's participation in a transatlantic culture, via his revision of the sketch, highlights US indebtedness to British literary influences. Irving's Geoffrey Crayon performs the role of romantic spectator; yet rather than simply reinforce the tradition of a figure who “could see all and yet remain respectively unseen,” Crayon “reveal[s] [American] culture's embeddedness within a transatlantic history of performance and exchange” (37). The second chapter turns to class boundaries by examining how Edgar Allen Poe and George Lippard portray transatlantic fraternal orders. Situating the more canonical author in conversation with his sensational contemporary underscores their shared attention to fraternal societies and disparate takes on when the rituals they perform foster brotherly community or exacerbate cross-class tensions among those who lack a shared language of ritual. In chapters 3 and 4 Collins reads Melville's short fiction as refusing the familiar binary of elite theater versus theater of the masses to imagine a middlebrow alternative wherein subjects gain value by performing recognition of and deference to one another (129). Collins argues that Melville highlights violent fantasies of fixed, inherent identity, as he portrays how images of a cultural sphere untouched by the transatlantic market obscure the exploitation of women's labor, while use of a romantic child to embody his nation's identity depends upon the child's death to prevent him from changing (147). Collins's persuasive reading of Hawthorne – specifically, that his short fiction ironizes Puritans’ antitheatricality – links the chapters by arguing that, “Like Irving, Poe, and Melville, Hawthorne shows that the possibility of reconciliation between competing forces lies in theatricalized expressions of equality in the public sphere” (206). Finally, the epilogue asserts that Louisa May Alcott uses “drama and performance to burlesque the claims made by many realists to the fixity of racialized, gendered, and classed categories” (30).

Collins delves into the specific historical context of transatlantic performance culture, which provides a strong foundation for his readings. He thereby invites scholars to rethink how we teach such familiar stories as Irving's “Rip Van Winkle” and Melville's “Bartleby the Scrivener” and to reconsider “lesser” works like Hawthorne's “Main Street” and Lippard's White Banner. Collins's compelling close readings of stories leave me wanting more analysis of women writers and writers of color who remain at this study's periphery. The introduction suggests that the study's focus on male (and, we should note, white) writers reflects that “national political debate was becoming increasingly gendered according to the pernicious logic of separate spheres,” as was theater of the era (8). Yet each chapter punctuates analysis of more canonical figures with a turn to a woman writer or, in chapter 4, to Frederick Douglass. Collins's brief discussion of Douglass's “The Heroic Slave” raises intriguing questions about the racial stake of writing short stories, namely he argues that this genre's association with theater meant that the form raised “the spectre of blackface minstrelsy” (172). In demonstrating that minoritized writers engaged the exclusionary discourse of theater, such readings hint that attending more closely to short fiction by Douglass, Frances Harper, and Lydia Maria Child (to name but a few examples) could elucidate how transatlantic encounters shaped the performance of multiple American identities.