Hobbes, Sovereignty, and Early American Literature

Erscheinungsjahr 2015
ISBN: 978-1-107-08529-9
Verlag: Cambridge University Press

Buch, Englisch, Band 173, 350 Seiten, Format (B × H): 157 mm x 235 mm, Gewicht: 659 g

Reihe: Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture

Hobbes, Sovereignty, and Early American Literature pursues the question of democratic sovereignty as it was anticipated, theorized and resisted in the American colonies and in the early United States. It proposes that orthodox American liberal accounts of political community need to be supplemented and challenged by the deeply controversial theory of sovereignty that was articulated in Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan (1651). This book offers a radical re-evaluation of Hobbes's political theory and demonstrates how a renewed attention to key Hobbesian ideas might inform inventive re-readings of major American literary, religious and political texts. Ranging from seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Puritan attempts to theorize God's sovereignty to revolutionary and founding-era debates over popular sovereignty, this book argues that democratic aspiration still has much to learn from Hobbes's Leviathan and from the powerful liberal resistance it has repeatedly provoked.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Downes, Paul

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtswissenschaft Allgemein
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Geschichte einzelner Länder Amerikanische Geschichte
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturgeschichte und Literaturkritik

Inhaltsverzeichnis

1. Sovereignty's new clothes; 2. Re-reading Leviathan: the 'state of nature' and the 'artificial soul'; 3. Hobbes in America; 4. 'Heaven's sugar cake': Puritan sovereignty; 5. Tyranny's corpse: Jonathan Mayhew's revolutionary sermon on Romans; 6. 'Imperium in imperio': founding sovereignty; 7. Tar and feathers: Hawthorne's revolution; 8. Hobbes, slavery, and sovereign resistance; 9. Nat Turner and the African American revolution.

Über Autor(innen)

Downes, Paul
Paul Downes is Associate Professor of English and American Literature at the University of Toronto. He is the author of Democracy, Revolution, and Monarchism in Early American Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2002), which was a co-winner of the MLA prize for a first book. He has also written a number of essays on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American fiction. His work explores the concepts of democracy and sovereignty as they have been instituted and imagined in the early United States and in the discourse of transnational humanitarian intervention.