My book joins an ongoing debate about how we should think about reason.In recent decades, literary scholars have been somewhat skeptical about the high value nineteenth-century intellectuals placed on different kinds of rationality–scientific objectivity, political disinterestedness, and cosmopolitanism, among others. Most people recognize these are important ideals and powerful mental tools. But certain schools of critical history (influenced by thinkers like Michel Foucault, for instance) have raised red flags. The prestige that Western societies have accorded reason, they argue, can’t really be disentangled from some of the more pernicious aspects of our history, such as imperialism and racism.I test these questions about reason by examining four different literary projects from this period: literary realism, African American letters, Native American scholarly writing, and the philosophical movement of American pragmatism. By looking at the different ways that writers tried to harness rational reflection and artistic insight, we can see that literary culture had an uneven connection to the ideal of reason.When literary writers confronted mass culture as a serious rival, their first reaction was to assume this was going to be a contest of reason against unreason. There was a good deal of truth to that view. Beginning in the eighteenth century, literature and cultural criticism had helped to carve out a space for debate and reflection (what we now call the public sphere) that allowed people to reason together about politics and social change. Writers saw literary culture as a site of reason. Commercial culture, they believed, was just a site for profit, mindless entertainment, and unenlightened appetites and prejudice. (Think of blackface minstrelsy, for instance).But when you look more closely at the way literary culture was actually organized in this period, things get more complicated. For instance, African American intellectuals had to organize their own literary society, the American Negro Academy, to cultivate “the highest arts.” They were as committed as anyone to the idea that high art and critical thought were a crucial use of human reason. But they also knew that the white “cultured classes” rejected them. Black people were banned from most museums and concert halls. Even educated black people were largely excluded from white-run universities and literary journals. So even in pursuing the same ideals of cosmopolitan thought and public reason, African American intellectuals still found themselves outside the public sphere.This doesn’t mean that the ideals of reason and reflective art are nothing more than a front for the interests of those in power. But we also can’t assume that those ideals by themselves create open communication or foster cosmopolitanism.As I show in another chapter of Frantic Panoramas, Native American intellectuals also tried to join literary culture in this period. They founded a scholarly institution, the Society for the American Indian, and began publishing fiction and criticism in highbrow journals. But ironically, it was actually by participating in mass culture—Wild West shows, celebrity appearances by figures like Geronimo and Sitting Bull—that Native Americans found a way to address the larger public.The larger story of my book tells about how the most far-sighted writers began to recognize that literary culture had certain blind spots. What’s more, they discovered that mass culture might actually offer clues and insights about modern society that literary culture had not yet detected. But they didn’t just stumble across these insights. Literary writers in all corners of American culture–from Lakota reservations to New York salons–discovered these truths by extending literary reflection into new mass culture spaces. Reason by itself is not enlightened. But it does have the ability to reflect on itself and to open itself up to what it has previously written off as unreason.