Republican Monsters: The Cultural Construction of American Positivist Criminology, 1767-1920

This dissertation examines the history of and cultural influences on positivist criminology in the United States. From Benjamin Rush to the present day, the U.S. has produced an extensive corpus of empirical and theoretical studies that seeks to discern an objective, scientifically-grounded basis for criminal behavior. American positivist criminology has drawn on numerous subfields and theories, including rational choice / economic theory, biology, and psychology, but in all cases, maintains that a purely scientific explanation of offending is possible. This study proceeds from the perspective that divisions between scientific and non-scientific thought are untenable. Drawing on scholarship in literary criticism and sociology, I argue that positivist criminology confronts an inherent contradiction in purporting to develop a purely scientific account of phenomena that are defined by the moral and cultural sentiments of a society. I thus hypothesize that positivist criminology is in fact reliant on the irrational and fictive cultural tropes and images of crime that it claims to exorcize. The dissertation proceeds by reviewing the literature on the history of criminology, developing a set of functional types or tropes for character analysis, and then examining four separate periods in the development of scientific criminology: eighteenth century studies of rational action, nineteenth century studies of defective reasoning, early twentieth century studies of race and crime, and the development of scientifically informed criminalistics programs. Each of these cases captures a different period and focus in the development of scientific criminology. In threading continuity between these cases, I show how criminological positivism is consistently reliant on culturally informed tropes and characters to render itself sensible and coherent

Reanimating Ghost Editions, Reorienting the Early American Novel

What are the origins of the American novel? Does it begin with the imagination, when Europeans first began dreaming of life in the New World?1 Does it begin with Daniel Defoe’s adventurers, Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders, and their literary progeny? Or does the novel need a material presence in the soil of the New World? Does it begin in 1789, with William Hill Brown’s The Power of Sympathy?—which Isaiah Thomas, with shrewd prescience, marketed as the “first American novel.” Or does it begin even earlier, in 1742, with Benjamin Franklin’s first American edition of Samuel Richardson’s sentimental novel Pamela, published at his shop in Philadelphia? These are all arguable inception points for American fiction, grounded in particular kinds of historicist practices. But what if what we think we know about the material history of the novel in British America is wrong—or at least more complicated? What if we were able to push back by five decades the date of the first novel published in the American colonies and locate that first novel publication not in relatively liberal Pennsylvania, but at the height, and in the heart, of conservative Puritan Massachusetts? If the first novel published in the colonies was not a sentimental story about middling kinds of white people, as were Pamela and The Power of Sympathy, but rather a story about race, sex, violence, slavery, and colonialism, how would those facts change the stories we tell about the novel and early America

Literature in Transition : European aesthetics and the early American novel

This paper seeks to account for the strangely double nature of the early American novel. For twenty-first-century readers, novels such as Hugh Henry Brackenridge's Modem Chivalry, Susanna Rowson's Charlotte Temple or Charles Brockden Brown's Wieland seem firmly embedded in a premodern culture that subordinates the rights of art under those of religion, morality, and education. In their persistent didacticism, their claims to truthfulness and social utility, and their long authorial digressions, these texts perform those kinds of heteronomous functions Romantic theorizing and literary practice of the early nineteenth century would seek to reject in their quest for literary autonomy. Yet a closer look at early American novels also reveals elements of modern artistic practice that exist side by side with premodern residues. Brackenridge, for instance, repeatedly insists that his work is but an exercise in style devoid of ideas, praises originality and the figure of the genius, consistently privileges form over subject matter, and ridicules the excessive didacticism of his contemporaries. In such passages, we can see a modern consciousness at work. Tensions between these modern impulses and a premodern sensibility pervade both early novels and aesthetics, another invention of the eighteenth century. This paper discusses those tensions from a systems-theoretical perspective

The Search for an Author: Shakespeare and the Framers

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Sympathy Control: Sentimental Politics and Early European Aesthetics

This essay re-reads early American sentimental novels (Charlotte Temple, The Coquette, Emily Hamilton) through the lens of contemporaneous European aesthetics (Baumgarten, Schiller) to argue that American writers' anxieties concerning the power of their work to either educate or deceive are more than defensive responses to the novel's detractors. These anxieties are real: they testify to concerns about the reliability of sensuous perception that also haunt early European aestheticians. Once we realize this, we see that sentimental writers do not, as major theorists of sentimentalism claim, unconditionally affirm the expression of feelings. Instead, they advocate what I call sympathy contro

Marriage, Coverture, and the Companionate Ideal in The Coquette and Dorval

In this essay, I focus on Hannah Webster Foster's The Coquette and Sally Sayward Barrell Keating Wood's Dorval, novels suggestive of how the topos of coverture is explored in early American fiction with regard to bourgeois women. While discussions of coverture in general speak to the foreclosure of independence for women in the wake of the American Revolution, both Foster and Wood expose the larger economic implications of coverture for a nation in which wealth was becoming increasingly portable and hence vulnerable to the schemes of unethical or fiscally irresponsible men