Manning America: Francis Hutcheson, homoaffective relations and national identity in the early Republic.
Item
-
Title
-
Manning America: Francis Hutcheson, homoaffective relations and national identity in the early Republic.
-
Identifier
-
AAI3330128
-
identifier
-
3330128
-
Creator
-
Kaplan, Robert.
-
Contributor
-
Adviser: Joan Richardson
-
Date
-
2008
-
Language
-
English
-
Publisher
-
City University of New York.
-
Subject
-
Literature, American | Gender Studies
-
Abstract
-
The American Revolution freed the colonies from Great Britain, but the type of nation that America was to be and, consequently, the form of government appropriate to it, remained highly contested. As the numerous revisions to state constitutions, the debates over the federal constitution, and the split between Federalists and Democrat-Republicans demonstrate, independence ushered in large-scale conflict concerning competing definitions of republicanism and of the type of society that it engendered.;This dissertation argues that these questions of national identity were framed in part through textual representations of intimate male-male relations, expressed especially by the language of the affections as developed in the Scottish moral philosophy of Francis Hutcheson. I begin by arguing for the importance of recuperating Hutcheson's work, exploring his often unacknowledged centrality to eighteenth-century Anglo-American thought and the overlooked significance of natural philosophy to his construction of social systems. I then analyze the ways in which his ideas of the moral sense, and of the virtuous communities that its affectionate responses produce, were grounded in eighteenth-century models of bodily processes and materiality, particularly Locke's sensational psychology and Newton's theories of occult qualities. Utilizing a variety of critical models, including Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's paradigm of male homosociality, Alan Bray's and George E. Haggerty's analyses of male-male friendship, and feminist work on the body, I link this corporeality to the affective premises of Hutcheson< s communitarian ideals and to the gendered structure of civic power in eighteenth-century Anglo-America. Doing so enables me to theorize what I call "male homoaffective relations": intimate relations between men that produce the varying sociopolitical communities which underlie the differing visions of post-Revolutionary America. This model enables me to generate new readings of such foundational texts as The Federalist Papers, Charles Brockden Brown's Edgar Huntly, and James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans..
-
Type
-
dissertation
-
Source
-
PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
-
degree
-
Ph.D.
