Beware of Americans Bearing Gifts

I Cultural theory often celebrates gift-giving as a benevolent force opposed to the socially destructive energies of commodity capitalism. Alexandra Urakova's Dangerous Giving challenges this utopian tradition by showing just how ambivalent nineteenth-century writers in the United States were about the potentially pernicious effects of giving gifts. Rather than locating a space outside conflict and competition, gifts and the discourse surrounding their exchange lay bare, and in some cases intensify, the many forms of inequality that structured nineteenth-century American life.