For the last fifteen years, American literary studies has experienced a crisis of disenchantment. Frustrated with dominant historicist approaches that seek to uncover and explain a hidden meaning in texts, critics have turned away from suspicious and disenchanted readings. For example, in her introduction to a 2013 forum in J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, Nancy Bentley identifies a trend of “critical disenchantment” and distrust of texts, and instead presses scholars to “reimagine critique as enchantment.”Footnote ¹ Taking up this call recently, nineteenth-centuryists have reengaged with aesthetics and optimistic reading, from Christopher Looby and Cindy Weinstein's collection American Literature's Aesthetic Dimensions (2012) to Christopher Castiglia's reinvigoration of Cold War criticism in The Practices of Hope: Literary Criticism in Disenchanted Times (2017). While these works are deeply invested in enchanted reading, they are not necessarily interested in scenes of enchantment on the page. In episodes of mesmerism, spiritualism, hauntings, and time travel, characters suspend their own disbelief and inhabit worlds where the seemingly impossible is possible. Two recent books, Michelle Sizemore's American Enchantment and Emily Ogden's Credulity, bring together both concerns by considering how texts enact enchantment for readers through the depiction of enchantment itself. In doing so, both Sizemore and Ogden show enchantment as a modern practice essential to the formation of the American citizen in early national and antebellum America.

Grounded in political theory, Sizemore's American Enchantment asks what happens to “the people” as a collective if they no longer have a symbol of sovereignty in the king's body. Enchantment – parades, reenactments, religious fanaticism, time travel – she argues, furnishes “the people with a new body” (1). It is the mysticism of enchantment and the language of religious experience, rather than the rational public sphere, that “represents the collective motion of the people” from the Revolution to the 1840s (8, original emphasis). In thinking about popular sovereignty as a temporal process, “the people” come to be represented by episodes and figures of nonlinear time: pagan ritual, religious delusionists, missing men, the historical romance. Chapter 1 sets out this recursive ritual politics through early national interest in the maypole as a kinaesthetic “pagan counterorigin” to the Puritan founding of British America (19). Just as the maypole resists the Puritan interregnum, as seen in Hawthorne's “The May-Pole of Merry Mount” (1832), its transformation into the early national liberty pole rejects aristocratic (British) rule. The energy of pole-raising shows the people not as a monolith but rather a “multitude, mass, miscellany, crowd, population, swarm, assemblage” (42). Sizemore's language here, and throughout, is one of movement and transformation.

Throughout the book, populations are reinvigorated and become “the people” by looking backwards to Revolutionary and colonial America in recursive and nonlinear narratives. A chapter on the idolatry of George Washington shows Americans attempting to recuperate the cohesive power of the king's supernatural body. However, the Whiskey Rebellion, for example, shows a people in disarray yet who still lay claim to – and reanimate – the Revolution through their protests against the government. A closing section on Brackenridge's Modern Chivalry (1792–1815) reads protean Irish manservant Teague O'Reagan as a “perverse stand-in for Washington” (69). A liminal figure who slips between racial and class categories, tarred-and-feathered Reagan shows the volatility and potential for change in the early republic.

On Wieland (1798), a novel centred on an inexplicable voice, Sizemore returns Brown scholarship to the relationship between divine voices and political theology. Through divine impersonation, ventriloquist Carwin represents citizens seeking “self-legitimation as well as a symbolic substitute” for the king's sovereignty (78). Furthermore, Clara's mesmerized reaction to Carwin – taking her out of her own body – again challenges the idea of a self-contained, self-controlled unified citizen. Turning to The Sketchbook of Geoffrey Crayon (1819–20), Sizemore makes a convincing case for reading the whole collection together as Irving “fuses elements from different times and spaces to produce extraordinary arrangements” that disavow history as “a causally driven series of directed movement” (121, 122). A generative close reading of “Rip van Winkle” details both the influence of seventeenth-century Dutch genre painting and indigenous storytelling, which shows that the nation cannot be removed from its colonial context of empire, slave labour and genocide. These overlapping temporalities, Sizemore claims, encourage readers to think of history as “possibilities that have been lost” but not forgotten (131).

The final chapter addresses historical fiction that poses the question of how to represent not just the Revolution, but the present too. For example, although Catherine Maria Sedgwick's The Linwoods (1835) does not have the same supernatural reading available as the previous texts, Sizemore uses the novel to return to her opening point about people-in-process. Relationships in the novel, framed in the language of enchantment, are founded on action, which suggests that the Revolution is ongoing, even for Sedgwick's 1830s readers. These relationships cut across lines of gender, race, and class, enabling a progressive reading of previously enslaved Rose's docility as a deliberate action, which allows her to claim agency and “revive the Revolution's principles anew” for antebellum readers (165).

Whereas Sizemore considers enchantment's positive role in connecting and shaping the collective, Emily Ogden's Credulity explicitly addresses enchantment's negative possibility for manipulation. Like Sizemore, Ogden opens her work with the claim that enchantment, or credulity, is not premodern irrationality, but a central facet of the modern citizen subject: “enchantment can only be modern!” (9, original emphasis). Precisely, it is the modern subject who, in the words of Bruno Latour, “believes that others believe” (30). Writing a cultural history of US mesmerism from the 1780s to the 1850s, Sizemore demonstrates the symbiotic relationship at work between mesmerizer and mesmerized; mesmerists saw their subjects and audiences as manipulable and often a “primitive remnant” of the pre-Enlightenment, yet they depended on others’ credulity to assert their own secular modernity (17). As a cultural history the book makes welcome turns to literary texts that not only represent episodes of mesmerism but consider the relationship between literature and mesmerism itself. Ogden starts with Benjamin Franklin's debunking of mesmerism in 1780s Paris, to set up modernity's dependence on others’ credulity. Crucially, this debunking, reports of which circulated in northern cities, unleashed mesmerism as a possibility onto an American audience – “because mesmerism was debunked, it thrived” (67, original emphasis). At the same time, early US fiction trains readers to become debunkers themselves. In a smart choice that sidesteps Wieland, which would seem the clearest choice of a text testing credulity, Ogden instead centres on Hannah Webster Foster's The Coquette (1797) as the perfect laboratory for readers to “master their own imagination” by, ironically, fully believing in fictional characters as real (55). By the time mesmerism arrives on US shores in the 1830s, literary audiences were already engaged with monitoring others to assure their own rational selves.

The following chapters chart the practical and imaginative applications of mesmerism in antebellum America. Ogden turns to factories in Lowell, Massachusetts, where machine workers were magnetized by Charles Poyen, a mesmerizer who began his practice on Guadeloupian sugar plantations. Mesmerism worked as a tool of social delineation, marking out and dominating women, the enslaved, and the disabled. The case of Cynthia Gleason, who became a more efficient worker after mesmeric trances, shows the possibility of mesmerism as “management strategy” (20). Throughout each chapter, Ogden's argument is clear: mesmerists desired to control and exploit others’ belief while attempting to disavow or moderate credulity in themselves. For example, on phrenomesmerism – the taking on of another's personality by touching them or their possessions – Ogden sees the subject's disempowerment as central to making mesmerists “feel like secular agents” who could read character through them (160). For Ogden, phrenomesmerism is foundational to Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance (1852), whose impressible characters act out both obedient and deliberate disempowerment to negotiate social and gender relations.

An extended personal history of visually impaired Loraina Brackett is the most rewarding section of the book. In discussing Brackett's clairvoyant conversations with sceptics, Ogden finds “an excluded middle, in which one is either enchanter or enchanted, agent or patient” (121). Here, mesmerism is a resistant act, in which Brackett can renegotiate her position as a disabled woman; her travelling visions engendered interdependency with her audiences, who needed to play along with her clairvoyant statements to continue their experiments. Although Ogden says in her coda, “it has not been my primary aim in this book to answer the question of what the practice does – ethically, politically – for the mesmeric subject,” her decision to bring to the fore the nuances of Brackett's agency as a disabled woman is a welcome one (228). Turning to spiritualism at the book's close, Ogden counters mesmerists’ claims on modernity. Carefully delineating between mesmerism and spiritualism, Ogden shows how spiritualists diverged from mesmerists by believing in their own belief to access higher forms of knowledge. As Ogden suggests in her close readings of mesmerist–mesmerized relationships throughout, and particularly in her coda on Ahab in Moby-Dick, the secular agent has “a certain clumsiness” and discomfort with belief and is no more secure in themselves than those who believe (237). An echo of her earlier discussion of Brackett and her sceptics, the modern citizen needs to occupy the “excluded middle,” by establishing a far more open relationship with credulity.

Both Sizemore and Ogden ask what a secular citizen looks like when we remove the barrier between rational and irrational spheres: either embracing enchantment to express popular sovereignty, or encouraging that enchantment in others for their own manipulation. Questions of who gets to be in the enchanted collective (Sizemore), and who must stay credulous (Ogden), are pertinent but neither fully considers the role of enchantment for a nonwhite (male) author or audience, who may stake their own claim on popular sovereignty or resist the rational dominance of white male mesmerists. Thinking beyond acts of enchantment, both authors examine the text's role in encouraging credulity and disavowing suspicion in reading practices. For example, a section on “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains” (1844) in Ogden's third chapter evinces how Poe actively encourages credulity in his readers. In a world where people are worried about being disparaged because they believe, literature becomes a space for readers to freely choose to be deluded, to “practice tolerating the suspended states that are, in fact, fairly characteristic of us” (129). Extending her argument on historical romance into her coda, Sizemore makes a compelling case for putting enchanted reading to work. She urges us to think beyond linear time to consider “literature as the site of not only multiple and competing tracks of history but also open and as-yet-unrealized futures” (170). This approach is particularly salient for readings of speculative and historical fiction, but fundamentally works beyond that in returning to Harry Levin's 1958 argument that “it is the business of fiction to explore what might have been, what may be, [and] what is not.”Footnote ² With enchantment as both an object of study and a methodology, Sizemore and Ogden make significant contributions to nineteenth-century studies and to the wider field's reading practices.