English
“Fanatics of a Dream”: American Literature, Peace Reform, and Enlightenment Paradoxes
My dissertation thinks through selected works of nineteenth-century American literature within the forgotten context of the transatlantic peace reform movement. The peace reform movement produced unique early critiques of militarization, war for profit, standing armies, colonialism, slavery, mob violence, violence to women, intemperence, and the violence of capitalism, that impacted reform discourse and literature. It also both internally conducted and more broadly generated philosophical debate about the origins, nature, forms, meanings, and justice, of ‘violence’ while generating creative thinking about means of achieving reform. Older scholarship that addresses nineteenth-century peace reform has usually been restricted to historical methodologies, or to overfamiliar accounts of Thoreauvian civil disobedience or the limitations of Garrisonian abolition. My intervention broadens the narrative of transatlantic peace reform’s early history, the issues it addressed, and the voices it involved, including more diverse voices like Ojibwe writer George Copway, former slave William Wells Brown, and less canonical work by white writers like Charles Brockden Brown, Herman Melville, and Harriet Beecher Stowe. I recover a sense of the peace reform movement’s alterity and idiosyncrasy from the archives, but also emphasize philosophical problems and theoretical legacies that remain with us today, drawing on critics like Spivak, Haraway, and Adorno, who charted classic analyses of violence, power, and representation, but also on more recent theory like Judith Butler’s 2020 work on nonviolence and philosophy, Achille Mbembe’s 2016 Necropolitics, Valencia’s 2018 Gore Capitalism, and Maggie Nelson’s 2012 The Art of Cruelty, among others, noticing a recent scholarly trend that aims to re-theorize violence and the politics of its hermeneutics.