by Susan M. Ryan

About Susan M. Ryan

Susan M. Ryan is Professor of English at the University of Louisville. She is the author of The Moral Economies of American Authorship: Reputation, Scandal, and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Marketplace and The Grammar of Good Intentions: Race and the Antebellum Culture of Benevolence.

Reform

book Keywords for American Cultural Studies

The term “reform” conveys a tension between constraint and possibility. The prefix re- suggests familiarity and recursion, just as the root form denotes structure, whether institutional or ideological. And yet “reform” also promises an improvement of circumstances or a mitigation of harm. This optimistic undercurrent requires that reformers not simply deride the existing order but propose alternatives. And to the extent that the term calls for a realignment of established elements rather than obliterating what exists and starting over, “reform” can seem less alarming—but also more tepid—than “radicalism” or “revolution,” even as it suggests greater political engagement than “benevolence” or “charity.”