A Nation in Sight: Visual Technology and Literary Culture in the Early United States

Abstract

A Nation in Sight asks how authors living in the immediate wake of national founding articulated, critiqued, and expanded the aspects of representative government by engaging with the contemporaneous discourses about visual representation. On the one hand, new visual technologies and emerging theories of sight allowed early Americans to collectively imagine an ideal version of the nation. On the other hand, the scientific and material realities of vision were problematic, giving rise to notions that any attempt at representation was deeply fraught from the outset. Even though optical devices allowed viewers to perceive the world in illuminating ways, they were always comprised of a host of elements that relied on distorting elements like lenses, mirrors, and other objects to trick the eye. I argue that crucial innovations in autobiography, poetry, and the novel that came to define American literature after the Revolution reflected attempts to reconcile the promises inscribed in republican political ideology with the frequently distorting and illusory qualities of real optical science with which writers were surrounded. I read a range of scientific texts about vision in order to offer new readings of The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, Phillis Wheatley's Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, and Charles Brockden Brown's Wieland, or the Transformation: An American Tale. A Nation in Sight provides an account of American literature in which authors employed the language of visual technology to uncover the civic and political inclusions and exclusions that inhered in the theories and practices of a newly formed representative government.