The Pleasures of Conspiracy: American Literature 1870--1910

This dissertation reconsiders late-nineteenth-century American literary history by showing how American writers between 1870 and 1910 developed and responded to a distinctively literary language of conspiracy. This study provides both a new perspective on how authors responded to the deep sense of social and economic crisis following the Civil War and a clearer sense of the cultural reception of events, such as the rise of monopoly capitalism, the Haymarket Affair, and even questions surrounding the identity of William Shakespeare. For late-nineteenth-century writers and their audiences, the term "conspiracy" did not simply describe a crime, but became a vehicle through which suspicions about modernization and industrialization were channeled into exhilarating sensations of romance and mystery. A guiding ambition of this project to develop a critical paradigm for conspiracy fiction that rigorously engages the aesthetic, affective, and cognitive pleasures of conspiracy narratives.;Following a theoretical and historical introduction, four case studies reveal the influence of conspiracy thinking across diverse literary and cultural contexts. Analysis of Ignatius Donnelly's fiction and elaborate conspiracy theories on subjects including anarchist terrorism, Shakespeare's identity, and suspicions that British bankers had caused the Civil War, I propose that Donnelly's writings exemplify an aesthetic and philosophical investment in conspiracy in Gilded Age populist culture. Close-readings of Henry James' non-fiction writings on terrorism, his novel, The Princess Casamassima (1885), and "dynamite novels" elucidate James' ambitious narrative experiment through which he found something akin to the sublime in speculation on modern terrorism. Explorations of Charles Chesnutt's The Marrow of Tradition (1900) and The Colonel's Dream (1904) reveal Chesnutt's effort to use conspiracy narratives as a corrective to fraudulent histories of the Post-Civil War South in the context of a debate including W.E.B. DuBois, Albion Tourgee, and Thomas Dixon. Finally, analysis of Maria Ruiz de Burton's The Squatter and the Don (1885) against the backdrop of "The Colton Scandal" (an incident known as "the Rosetta Stone of bought government") reveals Ruiz de Burton's use of conspiracy as a framework for symbolizing the social upheavals, accompanying U.S. imperialist expansion into California.