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The New Star Chamber and Other Essays
Annotated Edition
Edgar Lee Masters (Author), Jason Stacy (Edited by), Brandon Adams (Edited by), Scott Both (Edited by), Joseph Davis (Edited by), Shawn Emily (Edited by), Jessica Guldner (Edited by), Amy Kapp (Edited by), Joseph King (Edited by), Andrew Niederhauser (Edited by), Abbigayle Schaefer (Edited by), Elizabeth Schroader (Edited by), Andrew Shepherd (Edited by), Nicholas Swain (Edited by), Lucas Turnbull (Edited by)
9780809370108
Paperback / softback, published 4 August 2023
234 pages, 14
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.6 cm, 0.054 kg
“This new edition is an essential resource for any study of the works of Edgar Lee Masters, as well as of the Progressive Era. It is especially valuable for the introduction, which provides a layered and illuminating context for such scholarship.”—Marcia Noe, author of Susan Glaspell: Voice from the Heartland
“Masters was an idealistic Democratic Party activist and friend of presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan when this book was published in 1904. The annotations, new to this edition, identify people and terms important to understanding the essays.”—Herbert K. Russell, author of Edgar Lee Masters: A Biography
Tracing the troubled roots of American capitalism and imperialism
Coedited by noted Masters scholar, Jason Stacy, and his class, “Editing History,” this annotated edition of Edgar Lee Masters’s The New Star Chamber and Other Essays reappears at a perilous time in US history, when large corporations and overseas conflicts once again threaten the integrity of American rights and liberties, and the United States still finds itself beholden to corporate power and the legacy of imperial hubris. In speaking to his times, Masters also speaks to ours.
These thirteen essays lay bare the political ideology that informed Spoon River Anthology. Masters argues that the dangerous imperialism championed by then-President Theodore Roosevelt was rooted in the Constitution itself. By debating the ethics of the Philippine-American War, criticizing Hamiltonian centralization of government, and extolling the virtues of Jeffersonian individualism, Masters elucidates the ways in which America had strayed from its constitutional morals and from democracy itself. The result is a compelling critique of corporate capitalism and burgeoning American imperialism, as well as an exemplary source for understanding its complicated author in the midst of his transformation from urban lawyer to poet of rural America.
In print again for the first time since 1904, this edition includes an introduction and historical annotations throughout. Edited and annotated by students at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, and designed and illustrated by students at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, this volume traces economic and political pathologies to the origins of the American republic. The New Star Chamber and Other Essays is as vital now as it was over 100 years ago.
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