"A Mania for Composition": Poe's Annus Mirabilis and the Violence of Nation-building

Abstract

As cultural theorists privilege global, transnational, and postnational subjectivities, the bloody spectacle of nation-building in Iraq reminds us that the age of nations appears far from its predicted denouement. The official rationale for invading and occupying that antique land—that we Americans have a “Manifest Destiny,” a divine duty, to liberate people from tyranny and thereby extend our own brand of freedom, capitalism, and materialism—marks a further aggrandizement of nineteenth-century national fantasies of power and virtue. Rooted in obstinate conceptions of English and Anglo-Saxon superiority, America’s “millennial role” as a “redeemer nation”—to recall Ernest Lee Tuveson’s Redeemer Nation: The Idea of America’s Millennial Role (1968)—became a cultural axiom in the 1840s as the tangled project of US nation-building coalesced for the first time into a popular dream of empire. The decision to “civilize” the continent, to annex Texas and wrest control of the Southwest from Mexico, fundamentally redefined national aspirations. Understanding the inherent contradictions of American nationhood that have subtly impelled our mutation from a much-admired republic wary of foreign entanglements into a dominant superpower scornful of world opinion forms one objective of this study. Despite current emphasis in the profession on thinking beyond the nation—envisioning literature as a deterritorialized field of activity, a space of cosmopolitan hybridity—the resurgence of jingoism thus compels renewed attention to the phantasm of American exceptionalism that still haunts us like an ominous bird of yore. More than a decade ago Annette Kolodny implored Americanists to relinquish their “grand obsessions” with an essential national literature and a concomitant “myth of origins”—to focus on “frontiers” as points of intercultural contact, rejecting the notion of an “overarching”