Phobia and American Literature, 1705-1937: A Therapeutic History

Phobia and American Literature, 1705-1937: A Therapeutic History tells a neglected, two-century history of phobia’s gradual emergence as a variable suffix in medicine, politics, and literature, ready to be appended to an array of objects, situations, and ideas. Across psychology’s early American and nineteenth-century varieties, phobia prompted a remarkable genealogy of thought in the Americas. Literary figures adapted conversations and debates happening among physicians to popular forms, such as sermons, essays, satire, novels, short stories, and creative ventures in the social sciences. Through this fusion of medical and literary activity, concentrated in the cities of Boston, Philadelphia, and New York, phobia’s analysis became a foundational locus for the development of a therapeutic imaginary at the heart of American liberalism. More precisely, phobia’s analysis became central to a discourse that regarded public mental health as an indispensable factor in the recognition of inalienable rights and civil liberties. By recovering the discursive contingencies that enabled this tradition, McLaughlin illuminates new connections between towering thinkers, among them Cotton Mather, John Adams, Benjamin Rush, Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., William James, and Zora Neale Hurston. Following these lines of influence and debate, emphasis is placed on the incisive care such figures brought to bear on phobia’s etymological development as a locus of psychological inquiry.

Don James McLaughlin, Assistant Professor of English, University of Tulsa

Don James McLaughlin is an assistant professor of nineteenth-century American literature at the University of Tulsa. He received his PhD in English from the University of Pennsylvania in 2017. Research for Phobia and American Literature has been supported by the Hench Post-Dissertation Fellowship at the American Antiquarian Society, the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, the John Carter Brown Library, a Quarry Farm Fellowship from the Center for Mark Twain Studies, and a Faculty Development Summer Fellowship from the University of Tulsa. His work has been published in the peer-reviewed journals Literature and Medicine, J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, and American Literature.