Transcendentalism and the problem of literary vision in Nineteenth-Century America

Introduction: the stare that signalizes

Emerson, transcendentalism, and the problem of literary vision

Doomed to be a witness: the authority of ineluctable vision in Douglass's slave narratives

Dim optics: privacy, access, and the reluctant seer in Hawthorne's House of the Seven Gables

Scarce opon my eyes: fleeting visions and the epistemology of metaphor in Dickinson's poetry

To arrange a perspective: Howells, Jewett, and the provoked eye of realism

Conclusion.