Natural causes: American gothic literature and the doctrine of natural law.
Item
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Title
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Natural causes: American gothic literature and the doctrine of natural law.
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Identifier
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AAI9959219
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identifier
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9959219
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Creator
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Rosen, Elizabeth Melinda.
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Contributor
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Adviser: William P. Kelly
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Date
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2000
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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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Literature, American | Law
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Abstract
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Less than one generation after Thomas Jefferson declared his native land to be "nature's nation" American gothic literature of the nineteenth-century paints a picture of nature disfigured: pestilence pollutes the landscape, ghosts follow the unwitting through verdant fields, virtuous men commit violent murders and corpses rise from their tombs. In the work of these gothic writers, the natural world is a locus of terror. Most striking, this image of a malevolent and untrustworthy nature, which is the hallmark of the gothic, made its mark as an American genre at almost the same moment that Jefferson and the other founding fathers used natural law as the authorizing principle of the American constitutional system.;This dissertation will examine the strange coincidence of two radically different notions of nature: In one, nature is a frightening landscape of the unpredictable and uncontrollable, as epitomized in the literature of the American gothic. In the second, nature is redemptive and didactic; the doctrine of natural law insisted that that nature would reveal the eternal principles of order upon which a new government could be built.;The dissertation is divided into four chapters. The first will consider natural law and its American application. It will document and describe the idealized view of nature that held sway when America's first novelists began to write. The second chapter will consider the work of Charles Brockden Brown. While the Enlightenment proffered a view of nature that was both ordered and legible, Brown's gothic work was set in a landscape that became both disordered and inscrutable. Washington Irving, the subject of the third chapter, is unique as a gothic author. He presents nature as a lost pastoral, and he is able to make fun of the conceits of natural law at the same time he senses the tragedy of their fiction. The last chapter win focus on the work of Edgar Allan Poe. In Poe's tales, the expansive American landscape appears to be contracting and nature, that limitless expanse so celebrated in American letters, becomes claustrophobic. In these, and in ways that have not as yet been charted critically, the real setting of American gothic literature has been the American legal landscape.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
