"Confounding Images offers historians a complex portrait of American culture in the antebellum era. Unlike other studies that fight to assign static, binary categories to experience--highbrow/lowbrow, masculine/feminine, plebeian/genteel--this work measures historical exigencies in their moment rather than by their eventualities, and in so doing offers readers rich insights about representation, both visual and textual."--Journal of the Early Republic "The best study to date of visual representation in antebellum American literature as stylistic practice and as market phenomenon."--Lawrence Buell, Harvard University