Epilogue

The epilogue to the book gestures toward the destiny of enthusiasm in the post-Civil War era. In the wake of the trauma of war, the end of slavery, and the birth of a technologically-oriented culture of disenchanted realism, political enthusiasm no longer seemed necessary or viable. At the same time, the final lesson of Walt Whitman circa the centennial of the American Revolution is not so much that political enthusiasm has come to an end but that it must take on new, unheard-of forms specific to its historical era—in Whitman’s view, that meant a struggle for the rights of labor against the corruptions of capitalism (what he called the “tramp and strike question”). As one indication of how literatures of enthusiasm continued to operate in the late nineteenth century, the chapter discusses Edward Bellamy’s utopian novel Looking Backward and Whitman’s contemporaneous interest in anti-capitalism. Enthusiasm is finally what Whitman calls the “latent right of insurrection,” a “quenchless, indispensable fire” in the convulsive context of political tyranny.

An Answer to the Question

This chapter analyzes the broad history and philosophy of enthusiasm from the Antinomian Crisis of 1636-1638 in colonial America to the revolutionary Enlightenment at the end of the eighteenth century. From Immanuel Kant to Thomas Paine, Anne Hutchinson to Nathaniel Hawthorne, enthusiasm emerges as a discourse of “constituent power,” the notion in political theory that democracy emanates from the living will of the people and that individuals have the right, therefore, to resist or abolish governments that use the force of law to abuse them. The author argues that, in early American debates about religious antinomianism, especially women’s access to political or social power, the language of enthusiasm was a theological construct of “constituent power” that became overtly politicized in the Revolutionary era and eventually incorporated into Romantic philosophy. Finally, through short readings of Charles Brockden Brown’s Ormond and Sarah Pogson’s The Female Enthusiast, the chapter demonstrates that certain literatures of the early Republic define enthusiasm (as women’s dissent and constituent power) over/against domestic sensibility and the sentimental tradition.

The Free State of Whitman

This chapter examines Walt Whitman’s poetics of enthusiasm in the 1860 Leaves of Grass, specifically in relationship to John Brown’s 1859 raid on Harper’s Ferry and the politics of the Civil War. The author makes a case for Whitman, not as the national bard of American Unionism and integralism who speaks for all and heals the nation’s fragmentation, but as the bard of American civil war and international sectarianism who speaks only for the enthusiast of justice in a global context and calls for political dismemberment of the Union. First, in an analysis of Civil War rhetoric and responses to John Brown, the chapter demonstrates that enthusiasm enacts a “fractured state,” a will to political dismemberment (civil disunion) in the name of justice towards the slave. Second, the chapter shows how Whitman’s composition of a dismembered self and poetry in the 1860 Leaves is meant to enact an insurrectionary form of democratic camaraderie and love. Next, the author does a close reading of Whitman’s cluster of poems, “Songs of Insurrection,” in order to tease out Whitman’s enthusiastic politics in detail, before turning to Whitman’s application of that enthusiasm while working in Civil War hospitals.

The Revival of Revolt

This chapter discusses the historical role that African and Afro-Protestant revival and conjure religion played in fomenting slave rebellions in the Americas. Pointing to the influence that slave insurrections had on antebellum antislavery novels in the wake of the sectional crisis, the author establishes the historical and theoretical grounds for what he calls the novel of enthusiasm. He does this in two ways. First, the chapter explores the cross-fertilization between black cultures of enthusiasm and emergent Romantic sensibilities in nineteenth-century aesthetics, especially the novel. Second, the chapter analyzes two interconnected prose works as novels of enthusiasm (Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Dred and Martin Delany’s Blake), both of which link cultures of slave insurrection to cultures of enthusiasm and uniquely place US black resistance in a transatlantic context among insurgent maroons. Furthermore, the author contends that Stowe and Delany turn novel writing itself into an enthusiastic contact zone (of call and response) with the reader, soliciting us to speed up the political crisis of slavery through direct intervention.

Shaking Hands with the Prophet

This chapter focuses on the War of 1812 era and Native American resistance to US imperialism. It documents how the politics of enthusiasm, understood as religious fanaticism, was mobilized to discredit the rise of a multi-tribal Native American confederation and its right to resistance. Tenskwatawa, or the Shawnee Prophet, figures centrally in this cultural criticism, and the author analyzes available accounts of the Prophet and his brother Tecumseh, highlighting indigenous dissent as a performance of enthusiasm. Subsequently, the chapter turns to obscure War of 1812 novels (Samuel Woodworth’s The Champions of Freedom, Don Pedro Casender’s The Lost Virgin of the South, and James Strange French’s Elkswatawa) in order to show how American literature absorbed Native American enthusiasms. In these novels it becomes apparent that a pro-American vision of the War of 1812 requires the white imagination to displace and appropriate Native America’s rightful struggle for independence. The chapter ends with a reading of the Pequot American Indian, William Apess, and his response to the War of 1812. Apess is unique for defending an indigenous enthusiastic politics in sympathy with the multi-tribal confederation, and he invents a Native American literature of enthusiasm in the process.

Rites of Dissent

Against the dominant interpretation of the American Revolution as a conservative historical phenomenon, this chapter argues for a reading of the event in which enthusiastic “rites of dissent” play a constitutive role for supporters and critics alike. The author discusses both the Loyalist and Patriot view that colonial resistance in the years leading up to and during the American Revolution was a species of mobbish English enthusiasm conjuring both the English Civil War (the specter of Oliver Cromwell) and the populist revival religion associated with George Whitefield. Through readings of Mercy Otis Warren, Thomas Paine, and Phillis Wheatley, the chapter’s claim is that literatures of enthusiasm, as a discourse of the American Revolutionary event, do indeed draw upon the Puritan revolutionary and Great Awakening revival heritage. Specifically, these literatures invent an insurgent American print culture that transforms aesthetic labor into an expression of dissent—a “theatre of action” that goads the reader to participate in a sacred drama of historical transformation. However, as a result of the post-Revolutionary backlash against political enthusiasm, Warren, Paine, and Wheatley each have had a troubled and uncertain place in American literary history.

Introduction

This chapter provides an overview of the book’s historical, political, and literary material. It is broken into three sections. The first section situates “enthusiasm” in relationship to the modern critique of revolution and leveling democracy, specifically the American and French Revolution, through discussions of Edmund Burke and William Blake. The second section argues for enthusiasm’s importance to transnational studies of American literature, histories of American protest and American religion, affect theory, and philosophies of emancipation (or “the event”). The third section defines what the author calls “literatures of enthusiasm” as a convulsive writing of political crisis encouraging acts of dissent and liberation, using Frederick Douglass and Walt Whitman as examples.