Earthquake and the Invention of America The Making of Elsewhere Catastrophe

Earthquake and the Invention of America: The Making of Elsewhere Catastrophe explores the role of earthquakes in shaping the deep timeframes and multi-hemispheric geographies of American literary history. Spanning the ancient world to the futuristic continents of speculative fiction, the earthquake stories assembled here together reveal the emergence of a broadly Western cultural syndrome that became an acute national fantasy: elsewhere catastrophe, an unspoken but widely prevalent sense that catastrophe is somehow "un-American." Catastrophe must be elsewhere because it affirms the rightness of "here" where conquest, according to the syndrome's logic, did not happen and is not occurring. The psychic investment in elsewhere catastrophe coalesced slowly, across centuries; varieties of it can be found in various European traditions of the modern. Yet in its most striking modes and resonances, elsewhere catastrophe proves fundamental to the invention of US-America--which is why earthquake, as the exemplary elsewhere catastrophe, is the disaster that must always happen far away or be forgotten. The book's eight chapters and epilogue range from Plato to the Puritans, from El Inca Garcilaso de la Vega and Voltaire to Herman Melville and N.K. Jemisin, examining along the way the seismic imaginings of Edgar Allan Poe, James Fenimore Cooper, Frederick Douglass, Emily Dickinson, and Jose Martí, among other writers. At the core of the book's inquiries are the earthquakes, historical and imagined, that act as both a recurrent eruptive force and a provocation for disparate modes of critical engagement with the long and catastrophic history of the Americas.

Anna Brickhouse, Linden Kent Memorial Professor of English and American Studies, University of Virginia

Anna Brickhouse is Linden Kent Memorial Professor of English and American Studies at the University of Virginia. Her first book, Transamerican Literary Relations and the Nineteenth-Century Public Sphere (Cambridge, 2004), received the Gustave O. Arlt Award in the Humanities from the Council of Graduate Schools as well as Honorable Mention for the Lora Romero first book prize from the American Studies Association. Her second book, The Unsettlement of America (Oxford, 2014), was awarded the Early American Literature prize from the Society of Early Americanists and the James Russell Lowell prize from the Modern Language Association.

AcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Earthquake and UndeceptionPART I THE SOUTHERNIZATION OF DISASTER: Earthquake History and Theory1. Elsewhere Catastrophe2. Predatory Optimism3. Pachacuti: Theory from the Torrid ZonePART II FROM SHAKING GROUND TO "THE STILLNESS"4. The Fragile Ground of New England, 1638--17555. The Settler Colonial Sublime6. Earthquake Amnesia7. The Undeceiving Earth8. The Seismic Civil WarEpilogue