Plots, Designs, and Schemes is the first study that investigates the
long history of American conspiracy theories from the perspective of
literary and cultural studies. Since research in these fields has so
far almost exclusively focused on the contemporary period, the book
concentrates on the time before 1960. Four detailed case studies offer
close readings of the Salem witchcraft crisis of 1692, fears of
Catholic invasion during the 1830s to 1850s, antebellum conspiracy
theories about slavery, and anxieties about Communist subversion
during the 1950s. The study primarily engages with factual texts, such
as sermons, pamphlets, political speeches, and confessional
narratives, but it also analyzes how fears of conspiracy were
dramatized and negotiated in fictional texts, such as Nathaniel
Hawthorne's Young Goodman Brown (1835) or Hermann Melville's Benito
Cereno (1855). The book offers three central insights: 1. The American
predilection for conspiracy theorizing can be traced back to the
co-presence and persistence of a specific epistemological paradigm
that relates all effects to intentional human action, the ideology of
republicanism, and the Puritan heritage. 2. Until far into the
twentieth century, conspiracy theories were considered a perfectly
legitimate form of knowledge. As such, they shaped how many Americans,
elites as well as “common” people, understood and reacted to
historical events. The Revolutionary War and the Civil War would not
have occurred without widespread conspiracy theories. 3. Although most
extant research claims the opposite, conspiracy theories have never
been as marginal and unimportant as in the past decades. Their
disqualification as stigmatized knowledge only occurred around 1960,
and coincided with a shift from theories that detect conspiracies
directed against the government to conspiracies by the government.
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Produktdetaljer
ISBN
9783110367942
Publisert
2015
Utgave
1. utgave
Utgiver
Vendor
De Gruyter
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Digital bok
Forfatter