Phobia and American Literature, 1705–1937

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.

• Introduction Phobia's 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: Hydrophobia's Doppelgänger: Spurious Rabies and Spontaneous Nosology at the Dawn of Phobia's Versatility 3: Cauterizing Colorphobia: Public Health Print Culture in Mary Hayden Pike, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Frederick Douglass 4: Before Homophobia: Konträre Sexualempfindung and Early Conversion Therapy in Oliver Wendell Holmes , Sr.'s A Mortal Antipathy 5: Monophobia's Pluralism: Deviant Expression in William, Henry, and Alice James 6: The Dirt on Mysophobia: Micro-Contaminations in Mark Twai's Three Thousand Years among the Microbes and Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God Epilogue: Allegories of Phagophobia