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Contemporary notions of friendship regularly place it in the private sphere, associated with feminized forms of sympathy and affection. As Ivy Schweitzer explains, however, this perception leads to a misunderstanding of American history. In an exploration of early American literature and culture, Schweitzer uncovers friendships built on a classical model that is both public and political in nature. Schweitzer begins with Aristotle's ideal of \"perfect\" friendship that positions freely chosen relationships among equals as the highest realization of ethical, social, and political bonds. Evidence in works by John Winthrop, Hannah Foster, James Fenimore Cooper, and Catharine Sedgwick confirms that this classical model shaped early American concepts of friendship and, thus, democracy. Schweitzer argues that recognizing the centrality of friendship as a cultural institution is critical to understanding the rationales for consolidating power among white males in the young nation. She also demonstrates how women, nonelite groups, and minorities have appropriated and redefined the discourse of perfect friendship, making equality its result rather than its requirement. By recovering the public nature of friendship, Schweitzer establishes discourse about affection and affiliation as a central component of American identity and democratic community.

Hannah Webster Foster's eighteenth-century novel The Boarding School shows how conduct literature and the republican culture of politeness create gender expectations for women's humor in the early United States. Foster teaches readers about the social effects of wit and guides them in using satire and irony to influence public opinion.

This essay focuses on the curious phenomenon of antifiction fictions, novels that rail against fiction in the form of fiction, through various examples from the early Republic such as William Hill Brown's The Power of Sympathy (1789) and Tabitha Gilman Tenney's Female Quixotism (1801). A critical engagement with Catherine Gallagher's claim that, in the early Republic, fictionality was \"but faintly understood\" leads me to argue that these novels' antifiction stances are anything but anxious defense strategies in the face of a powerful antifiction movement. Instead, they constitute fictionality signals that function as a major site for the early American novel's reflection on its own fictionality—and thus its modernity. Drawing on Niklas Luhmann's contention that modernization is first and foremost a process of functional differentiation that was still underway in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, this essay reads antifiction fictions as expressions of a transitional phase in the development of the novel into an autonomous genre within what systems theorists call \"the system of art.\" The antifiction novelists being discussed were caught up in this process just as fellow writers of their generation were, but by self-reflexively flaunting the internal contradictions resulting from the production of fiction that rejects fiction, it is they who carve out a space for the novel to be explicit about what it does best: deceive its readers, if only for the duration of the reading process, into mistaking made-up worlds for the real thing.

A skilled linguist from an early age, the young Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849) believed himself to be a poet of great genius destined to engage in literary taste-making within the American literary establishment. His earliest attempts at publication, however, reaped little attention from that establishment, which preferred to consolidate its power through an exclusionary clique system that promoted its favorite authors at the expense of superior but lesser-connected artists. In 1831, Poe, recognizing his own disadvantaged position within this system, adapted his strategy for achieving a literary career within his era’s establishment and began to focus on reforming that establishment while carving out a place for himself within its ranks as a means of gaining audience for his poetry.This thesis examines Poe’s positioning of himself in relation to his era’s literary establishment, focusing particularly on how his professional and personal interactions with that establishment’s literati impacted the trajectory of his career and the subject matter of his canon. Pursuant on this theme, the thesis employs a historical-biographical lens to analyze selections from Poe’s Poems (1831), critical essays, book reviews, New York “Literati” sketches, and late revenge tales as a means of contextualizing Poe’s work and author-figure within his own print culture. Ultimately, this thesis argues that Poe employed his creative and critical works not only to carve out a position for himself and his works within the American literary establishment of the 1830s–1840s by placing himself “before the eye of the world,” but also to channel and transmute his affective responses to the repeated rejections, resistance, and retaliation he experienced at that establishment’s hands.

Psychopathy is a personality disorder characterized by a lack of empathy, manipulativeness, the inability to feel remorse and regret, manipulativeness, and a glib, superficial charm. It is estimated that psychopaths make up anywhere from one to four percent of the general population. Despite their infrequency, they are especially dangerous because their superficial charm and artful demeanor belies their nefarious intentions. Though not yet a term, psychopathy captured nineteenth-century American authors’ imaginations who understood the disorder by its earlier conception: ‘moral insanity,’ ‘dangerous individual,’ and ‘monster.’ At the same time, these authors sustained from the Revolutionary to the Civil War Era a discussion on sympathy’s role in shaping and democratizing the nation. From the Founders to the reform movements of the nineteenth century, sympathy played a pivotal role: authors of sentimental fiction grounded their works in sympathy to argue for women’s equal status with men in both domestic and political spheres; abolitionists and authors of slave narratives used it to demonstrate the horrors of slavery and argue for African Americans’ democratic inclusion; orators and authors to promote women’s suffrage, labor reform, and temperance. It may be difficult to measure sympathy’s productive value in each of these, but on its own, sympathy was incapable of securing these movements’ ideals. This dissertation seeks to reconcile sympathy’s limits and vices as nineteenth-century authors imagined a nation in constant social, cultural, and political development. Why could women not be given the right to an agential voice, choose their marriage partner, or vote? Why did the majority population of a nation that boasted of its superlative freedom and democracy support slavery or, at least, feel indifferent to millions of brutalized, enslaved African Americans? How does a nation codify its laws to ensure that innocent, good people suffer while those who exploit them profit? Scholars often answer these questions by determining political power, social advantage, and economics as the limits for democratic exclusion. My dissertation articulates a theory of structural psychopathy as an alternative answer to these questions. As psychopaths are antithetical to sympathy, they can be understood as antidemocratic, nationally corrosive figures. Rather than a routine, individual diagnosis of characters, I strive to articulate how an entire nation might be psychopathic. Thus, structural psychopathy describes a nation whose social, cultural, and political architecture is consistent with the characteristic traits of psychopathy. Nineteenth-century American authors seized on what they understood to be sympathy’s adversary and portrayed this conflict in the affective and psychological conditions of a population whose framework determined their lack of—and ability to manipulate—sympathy while pursuing a self-interest that jeopardized the nation’s constitution.

Because Foster does not present Eliza's written fragments in the novel, the absence of her writing forms a temporal process of fragmenting \"over and over again.\" [...]this model might prove to be helpful to studies of gender in the early Republic-Eliza's gradual distancing from her community displays an avenue of response for women who could not openly rebel. Because individualism was the professed domain of men, aggressive figures of female individuality might not include the alternative identities represented by Eliza's model of fragmentation (rather than fracture).

[...]how does the novel critique various meanings of freedom, including those expressed in both liberalism and republicanism? Caught in these questions, Foster's characters struggle to define freedom either as the pleasure of free association and multiple options or as the ability to love virtue by finding delight in what is right.\\n She continues: \"While the effects of reading a conduct book and those of reading a novel would designedly be different, those effects nonetheless exploit the same potential, in which powerful books and impressionable readers combine to produce predictable, standardized effects\" (727).

To that we can now add a commitment to historic preservation, a vital belief in the transformative potential of literature, a deep appreciation of art, and a desire to advance the cause of African Americans. [...]she was clearly embedded within a network of social reformers and reforms committed to a variety of causes. While Theoda had no daughters, it is clear her son imbibed her beliefs, as one of his daughters, also named Theoda, attended Radcliffe, taught at Dana Hall School in Wellesley, and in 1910 founded a summer camp for young women dedicated to atiiletic pursuits - a somewhat advanced proposition at the time (Bush and Johnson 11; Hesperides 277).

The Mental Science of Sentimentalism in Nineteenth-Century American Literature explores the ways in which nineteenth-century mental sciences affected artistic production, specifically by and about women, to expand our scholarly understanding of sentimentalism as both a genre and affective theory. Literary criticism about nineteenth-century American sentimental fiction often assumes that sentimentalism and science are antithetical terms: while the first is manipulative and emotional, the second is objective and rational. As a result, much scholarship on sentimental fiction focuses on the popularity of the genre, often attributed to its intense emotionality, and its participation in, or resistance to, dominant ideologies.This dissertation argues that sentimental literature was, in fact, deeply shaped by an engagement with nineteenth-century mental sciences. Both sentimental fiction and the burgeoning discipline of psychology were concerned with questions about feelings, character, the will, healing, and heredity, reflecting the intellectual shift toward emotion. I assert that the alleged conventionality of sentimental fiction constructs a façade behind which women authors could explore new scientific discourses, which might otherwise have been deemed inappropriate subjects. In this way, this project attempts to move beyond the pro- and anti-sentimental arguments, instead examining how sentimental fiction can meaningfully contribute to debates over the biological nature of the human mind that continue in the present day.The four chapters in this dissertation function as case studies into the ways in which four female authors and their sentimental novels engage with different facets of nineteenth-century mental science: the will and self-development in Maria Susanna Cummins’s The Lamplighter (1854), phrenological theories of character in Fanny Fern’s Ruth Hall (1854), mesmerism and sympathetic identification in Laura Curtis Bullard’s Christine (1856), and heredity and self-making in Elizabeth Stoddard’s The Morgesons (1862).