It is exactly because literary language relies on the stylistic possibilities afforded by indirection that queer literary studies established such strong connections between indirection and the representation of queer content. It’s not only that queer content had to be reframed to be socially acceptable and publishable, though that certainly was an element. Rather, indirection itself tended to be a hallmark of both the literariness and the queerness of literary writing. This chapter examines some key examples of textual repression, latency, and queer sublimation in a range of texts by Charles Brockden Brown, Edward Prime-Stevenson, Henry James, Nella Larsen, Lillian Hellman, and James Purdy. Alongside those readings it animates an investigation of textual content by tracing key theorists of these literary strategies, most significantly Barbara Johnson and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. The chapter demonstrates how these quite particular questions, related to historical shifts in the representation of queer content, quickly settle into more general discipline-specific areas of enquiry.

This chapter shows how, from Charles Brockden Brown’s Edgar Huntly to Jeff Barnaby’s Blood Quantum, American horror erupts out of the violence performed on indigenous people by white settler society, on people and land on the slavery plantation, and on citizens in the Global South and Middle East during period when the United States has extended and protected American global hegemony. By reading American colonialism and neo-imperialism as central to American extractivist capitalism, the chapter reveals how American horror also narrates the devastating violence done to the planet itself. The chapter observes that much American horror produced by and for white settler society represents settler violence against people and land as justified and regenerative, but it also discusses a number of less reactionary texts that make plain the horrific violence inherent in the capitalist colonial project.

This essay considers Charles Brockden Brown’s Ormond as an imaginative experiment with neurodiversity, considering, in particular, what it means to know, as we do now, that different brains are fundamentally, neurologically different and how neurological difference might have been narrated before there was a language for it. This is an investigation not of intelligence or mental health but of fundamental neurological difference and what it might have meant for the late eighteenth century United States, then a new nation politically organized through republicanism in which representative (white, propertied) men were expected to represent the needs of “the people” and trusted with governance. Ormond troubles the foundational formulation that American bodyminds simply required the right education and training to become, in Benjamin Rush’s words, “republican machines” able “to perform their parts properly, in the great machine of the government of the state.” If republicanism was structured by a presumption of neurotypicality, Ormond presents a fascinating example of a novel working to represent different bodyminds during a time when there were not yet adequate narrative means for doing so.

This chapter extends the study of security from political science, sociology, and cultural anthropology to literary studies. To this end, the chapter puts into conversation Charles Brockden Brown’s urban gothic novel Arthur Mervyn (1799/1800) and the theorization of security offered by Michel Foucault. Brown’s fictional exploration of security and Foucault’s historico-theoretical approach both focus on political responses to infectious disease in urban spaces. While there are striking similarities between their perspectives, this chapter does not read Brown with Foucault. Rather, it shows how Brown’s literary treatment of the yellow fever epidemic that raged through Philadelphia in 1793 differs from what Foucault called the “security dispositif.” Brown proposes that the embrace of uncertainty in responding to the epidemic will have positive effects on the moral fiber of the republic. His republican security imaginary is irreducible to the Foucauldian program of critiquing the biopolitical regulation of individual and collective life, not least because Foucault’s target is a political order that is liberal rather than republican.

During and immediately after the American Revolution, US writers described a salubrious national climate that would ensure the prosperity of the nation. Maintaining a good climate involved managing air quality through various forms of so-called improvement. In the 1790s, a series of yellow fever epidemics upended this fantasy and suggested that the US atmosphere might be either fundamentally toxic or incredibly vulnerable to foreign contagion. During this period, maintaining healthy air came to be understood as a national security issue. This discourse offers one point of origin for the contemporary militarization of climate to the benefit of some and at the expense of others. The heightened vulnerability of poor and nonwhite communities to airborne toxins can also be traced to the 1790s, when the government prioritized the health of white bodies at the expense of black people. This chapter traces this arc through Mercy Otis Warren’s anti-British plays, writing by and about Benjamin Franklin, and the novels of Charles Brockden Brown. The chapter closes by connecting this literary history to contemporary scholarship about air pollution.