Abstract
American Terror interrogates the origins, contexts, and significance of the distinctive tone of terror within a major strain of early and nineteenth-century American literature. Contrary to critical tendencies to literary terror as a rejection or contrary reaction to Enlightenment thought, this book draws upon new work in affect theory and the refreshed interest in American intellectual history to argue that American authors sought through it to produce the peculiar affect of scientific objectivity: the feeling of thinking. As what counts as knowledge comes to be aligned with a set of abstract universal rules and processes—the scientific method, propositional logic, geometric models of analysis—literary terror does not reject such progress as unfeeling, but rather sets out to describe it in feeling. Employing close reading in concert with original historical research, this book threads the story of terror’s relation to philosophy through three American writers who not only write terror, but write about terror. It begins with Jonathan Edwards’s theoretical defense of terror as a sensation of truth, develops through Edgar Allan Poe’s refinement of terror’s sensation of truth within an aesthetics of analytical methodology, and culminates in Herman Melville’s dramatization of the consequences exacted by this terrific perspective: a radically unknowable universe that everywhere refuses to relax its demands to be known. Through this critical repositioning of literary terror, American Terror charts how the dark strain of American literature carves a previously unaccounted for affective curve in the route of philosophy from Enlightenment idealism to poststructuralism.
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