Book Description

This dissertation claims that a distinct mode of U.S. literature emerged in the one hundred years from the American Revolution to its centennial. I call this mode "literatures of enthusiasm." In this period, enthusiasm was a term used to describe persons--commoners, slaves, Native Americans, women, abolitionists--in active dissent against existing political conditions of tyranny and, in Thomas Carlyle's terms, motivated by eleutheromania (a "manic zeal for freedom"). I approach enthusiasm as a discursive matrix that orbits around insurrectionary publics--their prescriptive rights, limits, and forms; and I define literatures of enthusiasm as texts that participate in or encourage events of emancipatory or creative action extraneous to constituted power and deliberative norms. My primary task in this dissertation is to historicize an affect and discourse that was associated alternately with the terrors and ecstasies of radical democracy as expressed in passionate, anti-institutional, and collectivist political actions; and then to show how certain literatures formally and thematically work within the enthusiastic tradition in response to specific political crises of the era. With chapters on the American Revolution, slave revolts, Native American resistance, and the Civil War, this dissertation is the first to analyze American political enthusiasm in its own right and to argue for the centrality of enthusiasm in the formation of U.S. history and literary history. Chapter 1 establishes a broad theoretical and historical framework for my study of literatures of enthusiasm. I argue that enthusiasm should be seen as the embodied practice of "constituent power," the notion in political theory that individuals have the right to resist or abolish constitutional or legal power if this power uses the force of law to sustain unjust conditions. In Chapter 2 on the American Revolution, I argue that literatures of enthusiasm invent an insurgent American print culture that transforms aesthetic labor into a species of democratic crowd revolt. Not only in rebellion against English paradigms of government, texts by Mercy Otis Warren, Thomas Paine, and Phillis Wheatley shake off the prescriptive uses of English literary genres and press them into the service of planetary revolutionary demands. In Chapter 3, I read the War of 1812 as a Native American event of enthusiastic resistance to U.S. imperialism. Primarily through historical documents and lost historical fiction surrounding the pan-Indian confederacy and the War of 1812, I show how pro-American ideology of the war as a second American Revolution betrays a disavowed understanding that Native Americans now occupy (and always did occupy) the position of the American colonists in their revolt against tyranny. Chapter 4 examines the decisive but overlooked influence that enthusiasm had on antebellum U.S. abolitionist novels in the wake of the 1831 Southampton Insurrection. Novels of enthusiasm by Harriet Beecher Stowe and Martin Delany represent slave insurrection as a democratic, transatlantic phenomenon and turn novel writing itself into an enthusiastic contact zone with the reader, soliciting her to speed up the political crisis of slavery through direct intervention. In Chapter 5, my dissertation concludes with an analysis of Walt Whitman's 1860 poetics of enthusiasm. I make a case for Whitman, not as the national bard of American Unionism and integralism who speaks for all and heals the nation's fragmentation, but as the bard of American civil war and international sectarianism who speaks in the name of the enthusiast for queer democracy.