The Devil & Doctor Dwight: Satire & Theology in the Early American Republic. By Colin Wells. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. xii, 254 pp. Cloth, $49.95, ISBN 0-8078-2715-0. Paper, $19.95, ISBN 0-8078-5383-6.)

Abstract

In The Devil & Doctor Dwight, Colin Wells offers a bold case for Timothy Dwight's epic poem, “The Triumph of Infidelity” (1788), as “perhaps the preeminent example of American neoclassical or Augustan satire” (p. 3) and as “a unique example of the convergence of literature, religion, and politics at the moment the new American Republic was first being imagined” (p. 16). Wells convincingly argues that, contrary to the claims of many of Dwight's contemporaries and some modern historians, the poem was not an expression of a kind of counter-enlightenment; instead, Wells writes, it was an expression of “Christian empiricism” and a central element of “an ideological struggle over the meaning of intellectual enlightenment itself ” (p. 111). Dwight's “literary warfare against infidelity” (p. 11), Wells explains, was directed not only against Charles Chauncy's Universalist “pudding” but against all manifestations of what he viewed as the era's dangerous misunderstanding of man's flawed nature, a misunderstanding that he believed fueled the French Revolution and Jeffersonianism itself.