Agonizing Affection: Affect and Nation in Early America

Coviello, Peter

doi:10.1353/eal.2002.0025

Cited by 9 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 29 publications

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“…This article draws on the recent work of literary theorists, as well as early American historians, who in reconstructing the late-eighteenth-century notion of sensibility have begun to explore the political role of affect in the Revolutionary Era and, to a lesser extent, the decade of the 1790s (Barnes 1997;Burgett 1998;Burstein 1999Burstein , 2001Coviello 2002;Stern 1997;Van Sant 1993). In his article "Agonizing Affection," Coviello (2002) challenged the prevailing view of republican virtue as disinterested reason and argued that a capacity for feeling-in proper depth and extension-was a prerequisite for virtuous citizenship, precisely because the new American nation was imagined as an affective collectivity. Such feeling bound diverse and far-flung citizens together into relations of mutuality that united the civic body.…”

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confidence: 99%

James Madison’s Psychology of Public Opinion

Gabrielson

2008

Political Research Quarterly

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This article argues that in his “Party Press Essays,” James Madison expounds a psychology of public opinion that is identifiable, but less developed, in his earlier writings. In these essays, Madison explains how a territorial mean, or a “practicable sphere,” contributes to a psychological mean that creates a context for the emergence of an enlightened majority capable of mobilizing against an abusive regime. Attending to Madison’s psychology of public opinion highlights the political importance of affect in Madison’s thought and clarifies his position regarding the appropriate role of the people in a republic.

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confidence: 99%

James Madison’s Psychology of Public Opinion

Gabrielson

2008

Political Research Quarterly

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Annoyances, Tolerable and Intolerable

Schwartz

2024

Situation Critical

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This chapter revises an old question: Why do early Americanists say that the Puritans weren’t repressed? And what would be at stake if they were? The answer to the second question, it suggests, is happiness. To address the first, it examines a poem, Edward Johnson’s “New England’s Annoyances,” about an aspect of Puritan daily life that tends to fall away from our attention: the fact that daily life in one of the earliest English colonies in Algonquian territories was unrelentingly full of annoyances. The poem’s humor attempts to transform these annoyances from a source of division and fractiousness into an opportunity for mutual felicity. Closely read, Johnson’s poem showcases repression’s ordinariness; historicized, it showcases the situationally specific antagonisms that repression successfully hides from sight: the disturbing experience of sharing a form of existence—abstractly individual personhood—with radically different persons and polities, here the Indigenous peoples of the continent.

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Foster's Coquette : Resurrecting Friendship from the Tomb of Marriage

Schweitzer¹

2005

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Agonizing Affection: Affect and Nation in Early America

Cited by 9 publications

References 29 publications

James Madison’s Psychology of Public Opinion

James Madison’s Psychology of Public Opinion

Annoyances, Tolerable and Intolerable

Foster's Coquette : Resurrecting Friendship from the Tomb of Marriage

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