"Self-begot, Self-rais'd": Elective Orphanhood in American Novels, 1790-1852
Item
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Title
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"Self-begot, Self-rais'd": Elective Orphanhood in American Novels, 1790-1852
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Identifier
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d_2009_2013:64cc4fc9455e:11832
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identifier
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12390
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Creator
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Weiser, Karen,
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Contributor
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William P. Kelly
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Date
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2013
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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American literature | American studies | American | elective | novel | orphan | post-revolutionary | sentimental
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Abstract
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"Self-Begot, Self-Rais'd: Elective Orphanhood in American Novels, 1790-1852" explores the rhetoric of the family as a national poetics across the birth of American Literature in novels from the 1790s to the 1850s. In it I propose that the figure of the orphan, originating in the pamphlet literature of the American Revolution, became a useful and often-used trope in writing of the period. In novels by Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Allan Poe, and Herman Melville, as well as two obscure early popular novels about cross-dressing women (one anonymously published, the other by Herman Mann), I examine the various conceptual contexts, such as republicanism and aesthetics, which make the orphan legible as a figure encapsulating the woundedness and possibility of autogenesis. The elective orphan figure provides a new lens for reading a stock figure of sentimental writing, the sentimental orphan. These orphan figures, when viewed as doubles, shed light on the affective dissonance of revolutionary authority. This dissertation extends the work of Julie Ellison and Lori Merish by revealing the feminization of sympathy from enlightenment discourses of masculine fellow feeling.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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2009_2013.csv
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degree
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Ph.D.
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Program
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English
