Monstrous plots: An epidemiology of American narrative (Cotton Mather, John Winthrop).

摘要

This dissertation suggests two ways of conceptualizing epidemiology: first, it describes those strategies used by early American communities to articulate conceptions of illness and health, of immunity and contagion; second, it is a strategy of literary analysis that pays attention to the spatial and temporal framework of epidemics, and abides by the dynamic relation between immunology and ideology. Such an analytical strategy positions the field of Early American literary studies in relation to its reading of epidemics, and examines the rhetorical exigencies that framed questions about American Exceptionalism and Puritan cultural consensus. The project therefore situates itself at the intersection of national and epidemiological narratives, and progresses from explicitly historical concerns to an engagement with formal literary analysis.; The dissertation begins with an introduction of the term puritan epidemiology in the context of early New England colonialism (1620–1630). Seizing upon apparent immunological differences between Native American and English bodies, these epidemiologies helped to appropriate the American landscape into European historical frameworks. Next, it examines the epistemological and linguistic stakes of the Antinomian controversy to suggest that representations of Anne Hutchinson and antinomianism as “infectious” helped figure traditional feminine activities in the colony as potentially hazardous; this argument identifies the rhetorical force of epidemiological narratives in the context of figural illnesses. Third, the project argues that specific demographic factors in mid-seventeenth-century New England led to increasingly virulent and cyclical smallpox epidemics, and that these shifts suggest a biological model of citizenship, where shared immunological responses to illness set the ideological boundaries for community. Such changes manifest themselves in the evolution of genres like the New England jeremiad, which attempts to explain European-American susceptibility to epidemics within traditional Puritan theology. The last third of the project focuses on the relation between formal and epistemological concerns during the 1721 Boston inoculation controversy and the 1793 Philadelphia yellow fever epidemic. In each case, these concerns reveal themselves in the interaction between emerging medical and technological practices, and focus on the sites of racial and ideological difference.