This project considers the objective and material manifestations of invention, as well as the subjective processes (creative and mechanical) that invention signifies, in order to examine the historical, aesthetic, and ideological roles that invention plays within American literature, from the mid-nineteenth century through modernism. While I am concerned with invention's historical trajectory---I trace its promotion (what I call the "rhetoric of invention") in popular periodicals throughout the last half of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth---I'm ultimately interested in theorizing invention as a concept that requires an examination of both history and aesthetics. I argue that invention calls attention to a paradox within American culture that literary texts are especially adept at revealing: the newness that invention fetishizes often contains a violent, eruptive underside, which American literary authors both depict and complicate.;In chapter 1 I establish the project's foundation, which is to explain how invention became such a culturally prominent mode of action, how inventions came to symbolize the march of American "progress," and how inventors became the ideal American subject: an individual who sustains both himself and his nation by conjoining manual and intellectual processes. By investigating the depiction of invention in popular periodicals, lectures, and histories of invention (a mode which became quite popular in nineteenth-century America), I treat the rhetoric of invention as a text which can be close-read for what it reveals about the role of American artifice in the nation's self-conception, and in turn, how these ideas could support both subversive and ideological ends.;Herman Melville's Typee (1846) is a perfect example of invention's multiples uses. In chapter two I argue that Typee delivers a series of inventive counter-narratives that disarm the stereotypes that support colonization, and that deflate the sense of superiority that propelled Western colonialism. Using the rhetoric of invention against itself, including its portrayal of patents and intellectual property as necessary regulative mechanisms in the advancement of technology and industry (and hence, civilization itself), Typee undermines this logic by tapping into the subversive potential of invention as a creative force.;Beginning with the premise that 9/11 compels an urgent reevaluation of A Connecticut Yankee's representation of mechanized slaughter---in which electricity and Gatling guns reduce tens of thousands of Arthurian knights to "slush"---chapter two examines the various historical, aesthetic and disciplinary roles played by a specific American invention: the world's first automatic weapon. Arguing that its power to subdue crowds was due more to its cultural status than its actual use, I examine the paradox presented by a weapon like the Gatling gun: that its elegant appearance and functionality, as well as the latency of the threat it posed, was a power that operated by taking advantage of aesthetic perception and experience. The project's final chapter investigates the poetry and prose of Ezra Pound and Mina Loy for the enthusiasm it registers for, as Pound phrased it, "Machine Art." I argue that the formal invention that drove modernism cannot be divorced from the prominence of mechanical invention that American culture and industry made prominent (and in some cases, fetishized) through the turn of the century.
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