Phobia and American Literature, 1705–1937 - A Therapeutic History

Phobia and American Literature, 1705-1937: A Therapeutic History tells a neglected, two-century history of phobia's gradual emergence as a variable suffix in medicine, politics, and literature, ready to be appended to an array of objects, situations, and ideas.

List of contents

• Introduction Phobiaâs Metaphor: The Therapeutic Imagination in American Liberalism


• 1: The Looking Glass of Eisoptrophobia: Colonial Representation and Helmontian Hydrotherapy in Cotton Mather and John Adams


• 2: Hydrophobiaâs Doppelgÿnger: Spurious Rabies and Spontaneous Nosology at the Dawn of Phobiaâs Versatility


• 3: Cauterizing Colorphobia: Public Health Print Culture in Mary Hayden Pike, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Frederick Douglass


• 4: Before Homophobia: Kontrÿre Sexualempfindung and Early Conversion Therapy in Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.âs A Mortal Antipathy


• 5: Monophobiaâs Pluralism: Deviant Expression in William, Henry, and Alice James


• 6: The Dirt on Mysophobia: Micro-Contaminations in Mark Twainâs Three Thousand Years among the Microbes and Zora Neale Hurstonâs Their Eyes Were Watching God


• Epilogue: Allegories of Phagophobia

About the author

Don James McLaughlin is an assistant professor of nineteenth-century American literature at the University of Tulsa. He received his PhD in English from the University of Pennsylvania in 2017. Research for Phobia and American Literature has been supported by the Hench Post-Dissertation Fellowship at the American Antiquarian Society, the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, the John Carter Brown Library, a Quarry Farm Fellowship from the Center for Mark Twain Studies, and a Faculty Development Summer Fellowship from the University of Tulsa. His work has been published in the peer-reviewed journals Literature and Medicine, J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, and American Literature.

Product details

• Authors: Don James McLaughlin
• Publisher: Oxford Academic
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Release: 21.11.2025
• EAN: 9780198945987
• ISBN: 978-0-19-894598-7
• Series: Oxford Studies in American Literary History
• Subjects: Non-fiction book > Politics, society, business > Society; Social sciences, law, business > Sociology > General, dictionaries; PSYCHOLOGY / Emotions, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Popular Culture, Perception, PSYCHOLOGY / Cognitive Psychology & Cognition, Popular beliefs & controversial knowledge, Psychology: emotions, Behavioural theory (Behaviourism), Popular beliefs and controversial knowledge, Cognition and cognitive psychology, Behaviourism, Behavioural theory, PSYCHOLOGY / Psychotherapy / Behaviorism