| This project is about improvisation and representation. The diplomacy of the United States in the eighteenth century was characterized by a set of rhetorical and social performances that articulated the new nation's character. U.S. diplomacy depended on a series of exchanges---of texts, bodies, objects, or pleasantries---that adhered to protocol and courted favor. Therefore, Diplomatic Letters explores an array of cultural and literary materials: diplomatic letters and gifts, treaties of peace and friendship, political pamphlets, private journals, narratives of captivity. This study recovers diplomatic writing for literary study, making it visible as a textual corpus that does not demarcate the boundary between the historical and the literary, the evidentiary and the aesthetic, but demonstrates their mutual confluence.; Each chapter of my dissertation examines documents that illuminate the history of diplomatic invention. In my first chapter, I argue for a re-evaluation of the Plan of Treaties (1776) drafted by John Adams, one that restores its place alongside the Declaration of Independence and the Articles of Confederation as one of the three original founding documents of the new nation. Reconciling official instruction to the needs of the moment required U.S. representatives abroad to consider professional and political allegiances, personal agendas, intelligence reports, the press, public opinion, and prevalent ideologies. In my second chapter, I argue that this continual negotiation itself constitutes diplomatic pedagogy and privileges diplomatic work as a site at which the nation was imagined and articulated. In my third chapter, I show how "paper wars" mimicked the forms required by a foreign policy based on neutrality and by the codes that governed duels between honorable men. In this way, I suggest the extent to which diplomatic metaphors influenced self-constructions and social strategies as well as textual production. A final chapter focuses on the diplomatic journal of James Leander Cathcart, a text that provides an account of what is most absent from diplomatic histories: a narrative about achieving friendship between nations by cultivating friendship between men. |
