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Mania for Freedom: American Literatures of Enthusiasm from the Revolution to the Civil War

2017; Oxford University Press; Volume: 104; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/jahist/jax336

1945-2314

Lawrence Buell,

American Constitutional Law and Politics

Of the semantic barometers of epistemic change in the Anglophone Atlantic between the mid-eighteenth century and the later nineteenth, few are more telling than the shift in the meaning of enthusiasm in the direction of an honorific, against its earlier pejorative connotation as a synonym for fanaticism. As John Mac Kilgore makes clear, this lexical odyssey played itself out in distinctive but also cross-pollinating ways in the overlapping arenas of literature, religion, and political thought. Although Mania for Freedom focuses especially on Kilgore's home discipline of literature from the age of revolution to the eve of the American Civil War (with an illuminating coda on Edward Bellamy), its wide-angled interdisciplinary Anglo-Atlantic reach, particularly in the early chapters, will also interest scholars of intellectual history, political thought, and religious studies—especially considering that this is the first book-length reconnaissance of the subject by an American literature scholar. Kilgore makes no bones about his own enthusiasm for the rhetoric of enthusiasm and its cognates in the service of insurgence against dominant orders, most especially by or on behalf of the disempowered, particularly African Americans and Native Americans. Mania for Freedom seeks to make “a case for a certain body of literature that formalizes rites of dissent as revolutionary constituent power” (p. 97). This goal tends to give the argument and critical readings of its four central chapters a polemic cast that some will applaud but others distrust. The problematic side emerges most seriously in Kilgore's insistence on the affinity between Walt Whitman and John Brown on the strength of the scattering of “songs of insurrection” in the Whitman canon. Few will likely agree that Whitman is rightly understood “not as the national bard of American Unionism and integralism … but of American dismemberment and sectarian internationalism who speaks only for the enthusiast and a camaraderie based upon a ‘fractured state’” (p. 170, emphasis in original).