“This deeply thoughtful and widely-informed meditation on the place of photography in the work of four major American writers—Emerson, Thoreau, Douglass, and Whitman—is a book not just to read but to think with. His writers stand at no great distance from our own digital, hypermediated age, but at its dawn, reaching to us for their completion. This book will engage and enlighten anyone interested in the intertwining of literature, science, and technology.”—Laura Dassow Walls, author of Emerson's Life in Science

“Sean Ross Meehan has filled a substantial gap in the study of photography and literature, visual culture in nineteenth-century America, media studies, and mid-nineteenth-century American literature and autobiography. His focus on the pivotal American authors of the incipient photographic age is a topic that has gone begging for scholarly coverage. Meehan has sharply illuminated an important aspect of American thought and culture at the onset of the technological era.”—Linda Haverty Rugg, author of Picturing Ourselves: Photography and Autobiography

“Mediating American Autobiography offers new insights into nineteenth-century autobiographical acts by exploring how photography influenced conceptions of visual and verbal representation. I left the book with a deeper understanding of how key writers understood the new technology of photography, but, more important, how this new medium shaped and/or provided a vehicle for their self-understanding and self-presentation.”
—Bruce Mills, author of Poe, Fuller, and the Mesmeric Arts: Transition States in the American Renaissance

Both photography and autobiography involve a tension between disclosing and concealing their means of production: a chemical process for one, the writing process for the other. Meehan examines how four major authors—Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Frederick Douglass, and Walt Whitman—were well aware of this tension and explored it in their work. By examining the implications of early photography in their writings, he shows how each engaged the new visual medium, how photography mediated their conceptions of self-representation, and how their appropriation of photographic thinking created a new kind of autobiography.

Examining the metonymic nature of photography, Meehan explores how the new medium influenced conceptions of visual and verbal representation. He intertwines these four writers’ reflections on photography—in Emerson’s Representative Men, Thoreau’s journals, Douglass’s narratives of slavery, and Whitman’s Specimen Days—with theories of photography as expounded by its inventors and observers, from Louis Daguerre and William Talbot in Europe to Oliver Wendell Holmes and Marcus Root in America.

As the first book to focus on the emergence of this new visual medium during the American Renaissance, Mediating American Autobiography shows us what photography means for American literature in general and for the genre most closely linked to it in particular. Because the engagement of these writers with photography has been neglected in previous scholarship, Meehan’s work provocatively bridges the study of two media and illuminates an important aspect of American thought and culture at the dawn of the technological era.