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"In Utter Fearlessness of the Reigning Disease": Imagined Immunities and the Outbreak Narratives of Charles Brockden Brown
- Literature and Medicine
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 35, Number 1, Spring 2017
- pp. 144-166
- 10.1353/lm.2017.0006
- Article
- Additional Information
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Abstract:
With an increased focus on the intersection of literature and medicine, contagion has become something of a scholarly buzzword in early American studies: it serves metaphorically to demarcate the postcolonial other, demonstrates the transmissibility of revolutionary rhetoric, highlights the instability of republican government, and embodies fears of racial mixture. In this essay, I shift the emphasis from a discourse of contagion (often associated with a fear of the foreign) to a discourse of immunity (a fear associated with foreign immunities) in order to demonstrate a more affirmative biopolitics in Charles Brockden Brown's 1790s outbreak narratives. This affirmative biopolitics can emerge only after deconstructing the intersection of biology and politics in the so-called "age of democratic revolutions."