Novel experiments: Speculative science in early American literature.

摘要

This thesis explores eighteenth and nineteenth-century cultures of experiment, which are manifested as scientific, literary, and political experiments. As co-participants of this experimental culture, this thesis reads science, literature, and politics in conjunction with one another. Charles Brockden Brown's and Herman Melville's literary experimentations are treated as "fictional-thought experiments" that exist alongside and with the scientific and political experiments of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Of particular interest are the atmospheric and chemical sciences which are particularly useful for developing inventive ideas about race and nation.