Puritans, patriots, and proto-science fiction: The influence of early American culture on the production and consumption of science fiction and utopian fiction in American literature

This dissertation argues that science fiction and the subgenre of utopian fiction developed as an integral part of American fiction in the early nineteenth century because of Puritan influence and, to a lesser extent, the influence of the Enlightenment-educated minds of the Revolutionary Era. The increasing categorization of literature---impelled by the Industrial Age---excised science fiction from conventional fiction and deposited it into a commercial genre category by the turn of the century. Science fiction in its pre-marginalization form, however, pervades the earliest American fiction.; Chapter One establishes the parameters of the discussion of science fiction and American literature by defining the relevant terms and outlining the challenges inherent in examining fiction of a particular genre written before the identification of the specific genre. Chapter Two establishes that the dominance of a group of believers in the supernatural, the Puritans, established an early American cultural mindset that would readily accept the transition of elements from religious supernatural formats to secular scientific settings. Chapter Three examines how nineteenth-century American fiction writers adapted the religious supernatural configurations of the Puritans. To suit an audience ready to accept scientific or pseudoscientific explanations for phenomena previously understood to be the work of religious supernatural agency, authors like Charles Brockden Brown and Edgar Allan Poe adapted depictions of, for example, spectral voices and resurrection. Chapter Four examines how the development of utopian fiction in larger and more diverse quantity in the United States than elsewhere in the western world is a further manifestation of the proliferation of science fiction in nineteenth-century American literature. The post-millennialism of the Puritans and the utopian idealism of the nation's founders contributed to a cultural self-perception of American exceptionalism. This perception resulted in rampant utopianism, reflected in the utopian fiction that proliferated during the nineteenth century. The closing Epilogue considers how science fiction moved to the margins of literature in the wake of dime novels and pulp magazines, but has recently re-integrated into conventional fiction, as the twenty-first century witnesses cross-pollination of genres.