Thesis--Frankfurt am Main. / Bibliography: p. 171-175.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 2005. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 272-291).

During the most crucial years of the early republic (1780-1830), Jeffersonian Philanthropy saw the incorporation of the Native American into American citizenry as an ideal cornerstone for the building of the new nation. This assimilation would take many forms, yet the most discussed are intermarriage, the acceptance of Christianity, and the Native influence on the story of the nation's founding. This study examines the ways in which the literary genre of the Frontier Romance portrays, influences, and critiques Native American assimilation and interacts with political and social writing of the early republic. Intermarriage between Native and European Americans is discussed in a chapter on Rowson's Rueben and Rachel, Child'sHobomok, and Sedgwick's Hope Leslie. Christianity and the Native American is discussed in a chapter on Bleecker's The History of Maria Kittle, Brown's Wieland, Sedgewick's Hope Leslie, and the anonymously published work The Christian Indian. Lastly, the Natives role in shaping the American individual is discussed in a chapter covering Brown's Edgar Huntly, James McHenry's The Wilderness, and the third novel in James Fennimore Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales, The Prairie.

The work of nineteenth-century American poet Phoebe Cary presents a complex puzzle of exigence and purpose that combines social structure, political climate, and personal history. Known for her somber and spiritual sentimental poetry, Cary shocked readers and reviewers alike when she published her collection Poems and Parodies in 1854, which contained a series of scathing and hilarious parodies based on popular sentimental poetry. In my thesis, I work to untangle the various contextual elements surrounding Cary’s writing in order to gain a better understanding of the dual nature of the poet and her work. Through an examination of nineteenth-century American culture, sentimentalism, Cary’s career, and a close reading of selected parodies, I argue that by intentionally undermining patriarchal, sentimental conventions, Cary both reinstates agency and plurality to women through her female speakers and asserts her own agency as an autonomous artist.

Evidence suggests that psychopaths’ notoriously immoral behavior is due to affective rather than rational deficits. This evidence could be taken to show that, contrary to moral rationalism, moral norms are not norms of reason. Rationalists could reply either that psychopaths’ behavior is in fact primarily due to rational deficits or that affects are involved in responding to rational norms. Drawing on the work of Antonio Damasio and colleagues, I argue the latter is the better defense of moral rationalism.

Early sensation novels such as Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White, Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret, and Ellen Wood’s East Lynne use the eighteenth-century notion of sentiment in very distinct manners. These novels demonstrate a perspective in transition regarding sentimentality in how they apply sentimental qualities to very specific character types. Some characters are extremely sentimental, whereas others appear completely void of emotion and are even described as automata. These sensation novels even feature sentimental journeys and objects, as well as allusions to sentimental novels such as Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey and Henry Mackenzie’s Man of Feeling. The occurrence of sentimentality in these sensation novels aligns characters into two categories: those that are controlled (and in some instances debilitated) by sentiment, and those that can control their feelings. Thus, the sensation novel calls into question the authenticity of emotional expression as it is represented in the sentimental literary tradition. Existing research on these novels tends to focus on gender and madness, a majority of which focuses specifically on madwomen. Instances of women being driven to madness, however, also coincides with a pattern of sentimental behaviors that male characters share. These overly sentimental characters rarely, if ever, demonstrate rational thinking, and are cast in a negative light. In contrast, the sensation novel casts non-sentimental characters of both genders as skeptics and investigators who generally meet felicitous ends. This thesis will contribute to existing scholarship on sensation fiction by taking into account how these novels treat excessive affect as a sign of generic critique rather than just a biological symptom of a pathologized woman.

A farce, insofar as this study is concerned, is any afterpiece which has plot, dialogue, and characters. This embraces such widely scattered varieties as burlesque, dramatic satire, pastoral, comedy, and opera. This study embraces more than a hundred farces, the most popular ones of their day.

Sentimentalism as an ethical view makes a particular claim about moral judgment: to judge that something is right/wrong is to have a sentiment/emotion of approbation/disapprobation, or some kind of positive/negative feeling, toward that thing. However, several sentimentalists have argued that moral judgments involve not only having a specific kind of feelings or emotional responses, but judging that one would be <em>justified</em> in having that feeling or emotional response. In the literature, some authors have taken up the former position because the empirical data on moral judgment seems to suggest that justification is not a necessary prerequisite for making a moral judgment. Even if this is true, however, I argue that justifying moral judgments is still an important philosophic endeavour, and that developing an empirically constrained account of how a person might go about justifying his feelings/emotional responses as reasons for rendering (normative) moral judgments by using a coherentist method of justification is both plausible and desirable.

In The Sources of Normativity, Christine Korsgaard argues that in order to avoid the threat of moral skepticism, our moral theories must show how the claims they make about the nature of our actions obligate us to act morally. A theory that can justify the normativity of morality in this way answers what Korsgaard calls “the normative question.” Although Korsgaard claims that only Kantian theories of morality, such as her own, can answer the normative question, I argue that Adam Smith’s sentimentalist moral theory, as presented in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, can answer the normative question as well. As a result, it is possible to respond to the moral skeptic in the way Korsgaard outlines without accepting some of the theoretical drawbacks of Korsgaard’s own moral theory.

Sentimentalism as an ethical view makes a particular claim about moral judgment: to judge that something is right/wrong is to have a sentiment/emotion of approbation/disapprobation, or some kind of positive/negative feeling, toward that thing. However, several sentimentalists have argued that moral judgments involve not only having a specific kind of feelings or emotional responses, but judging that one would be <em>justified</em> in having that feeling or emotional response. In the literature, some authors have taken up the former position because the empirical data on moral judgment seems to suggest that justification is not a necessary prerequisite for making a moral judgment. Even if this is true, however, I argue that justifying moral judgments is still an important philosophic endeavour, and that developing an empirically constrained account of how a person might go about justifying his feelings/emotional responses as reasons for rendering (normative) moral judgments by using a coherentist method of justification is both plausible and desirable.