Books by Nan Goodman

Drawing on legal cases, legal debates, and fiction including works by James Fenimore Cooper, Mark Twain, Stephen Crane, and Charles Chesnutt, thsi book investigates changing notions of responsibility and agency in nineteenth-century America.

The author looks to both conventional historical sources and the literary depiction of accidents in the work of Mark Twain, Stephen Crane and others to explain the new ways that Americans began to make sense of the unexplained.