The genre of conjectural history: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Mary Shelley, and William Blake in the New World

This project examines Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Mary Shelley, and William Blake's common engagement of the genre of "conjectural history." This genre, which permeated European thought from the seventeenth to the early-nineteenth century, served to chronicle events--such as the origin of language, the origin of the sciences, and the origin of society--that fell outside the scope of recorded history. Conjectural history thus led the philosophers of this period to theorize in reference to a natural state that preceded these various origins. In practice, however, conjectural history's practitioners attempted to deduce the prehistory of European institutions from travel narratives that depicted the supposedly primitive societies of the New World. I argue, then, that Rousseau, Shelley, and Blake challenged the conventional usage of conjectural history by calling into question the historical and anthropological fictions upon which this genre was founded. Thus the primary work of this project is a description of these authors' use of this genre.;My introduction, "The Genre of Conjectural History," traces the history of conjectural history. Chapter one, "The Algebra of Man: Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Conjectural Histories," examines the tension between the genre of conjectural history and its particular manifestations in three texts by Rousseau: Essay on the Origin of Languages, The Social Contract, and Reveries of the Solitary Walker. My second chapter, "Mary Shelley's Nation of One," analyzes Shelley's strategic revisions of conjectural history and social contract theory in Frankenstein and The Last Man. With the final chapter of the project, "Pedagogy and Empire in Two Works of William Blake," I argue that Blake's substitution of a pedagogic approach to human relations for conjectural history's legal approach to these relations underlies the anti-colonial work of Visions of the Daughters of Albion and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. While the works of these authors are diverse, I conclude that they share an awareness of the genres that shaped their work; the particular means by which they were able to reach this awareness reveals, in turn, the means by which other authors might attempt the difficult task of understanding their lived history.