The "possessed" reassessed: Elizabeth Stoddard's The Morgesons, the Salem Witchcraft Hysteria and literary (anti)nationalism.(Critical essay)

From: ATQ (The American Transcendental Quarterly) | Date: March 1, 2007| Author: | Copyright information

The nineteenth century was a time of profound literary nationalism in the United States. As Van Wyck Brooks and Henry Steele Commager have written, beginning with the end of the War of 1812 and extending through the outbreak of the Civil War, readers and critics hungered for narratives whose subject matter was uniquely and unequivocally American. As a result, authors mined events such as the Revolutionary War, the clashes with American Indian tribes, and the settlement of the frontier in their quest for the nation's "usable past."

Although the Salem witchcraft hysteria is less ...

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