1 This essay draws and expands on Beautiful Deceptions, parts of which have been published earlier in Amerikastudien/ American Studies under the title “Early American Studies Now: A Polemic from Literary Studies” (2014). I would like to thank Kathrin Eckerth for her diligent proofreading. Fluck and the Early American Novel Philipp Schweighauser When writing my second book, Beautiful Deceptions: European Aesthetics, the Early American Novel, and Illusionist Art (2016), one article by Winfried Fluck proved to be particularly valuable. 1 In “From Aesthetics to Political Criticism: Theories of the Early American Novel” (2000), Fluck expertly traces the development of criticism on the first American novels from the early 1940s to the 1990s. In his account, the earliest contributions until the early 1970s were preoccupied with judging the aesthetic qualities of novels and found them wanting. For critics like Herbert Ross Brown, Alexander Cowie, Henri Petter, and Michael Lowenstein, these early fictions were imperfect imitations of their British precursors. These critics subscribed to what Fluck calls the ‘infancy thesis,’ the idea that the inconsistencies and faults of novels published in the early republic are due to the genre’s fledgling status. In this context, the sentimental novel comes up for especially severe censure. In these readings, the aesthetic deficiencies of early novels - in particular their lack of originality and ‘immaturity’ - bear witness to the colonial lag and are fueled by “Romanticism and its cult of originality” (“From Aesthetics,” in this volume 159). For these literary critics, these novels’ interest lies primarily in the insights they give us into “a cultural history of taste” (161). Such texts are interesting, then, first and foremost as “cultural document[s]” (161), with the possible exception of Charles Brockden Brown’s novels and Hugh Henry Brackenridge’s Modern Chivalry, which, for some critics in the ‘infancy thesis’ camp, come closest to being mature fictions. Things took a decisive turn in the 1980s, when Emory Elliott’s Revolutionary Writers: Literature and Authority in the New Republic, 1725-1810 (1982), Jay Fliegelman’s Prodigals and Pilgrims: The American Revolution against Patriarchal Authority, 1750-1800 (1982), and Cathy N. Davidson’s seminal Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America (1986) shifted the focus from aesthetics to politics. For these critics, tensions, inconsistencies, and faults in early Amer‐ ican novels are no aesthetic flaws; instead, they reflect and comment on the political tensions and inconsistencies that emerged during the transition from community-oriented republicanism to individualist liberalism as a hegemonic ideology. Formal tensions in literary texts reflect social tensions in empirical reality. In Fliegelman’s, Elliott’s, and Davidson’s hands, early American novels’ politics of representation were evaluated positively as the shift toward liberalism that they registered was seen as embracing a progressive, most notably, in the case of the sentimental novel, feminist, politics. For them, formal inconsistencies and contradictions in early American fictions subvert rigid patriarchal social structures in dialogical, carnivalesque fashion. Against earlier critics, who scrutinized sentimental novels particularly harshly, Davidson argues that these texts are ‘realist’ and ‘true,’ portraying the fates of fallen and married women while giving a voice to the marginalized. It is in this sense that early American novels more generally function as a form of “political empowerment” (Fluck, “Aesthetics,” 178). Critics of the 1990s such as Larzer Ziff, Grantland S. Rice, and Michael T. Gilmore remained within the textual politics framework and also produced mimetic readings but judged the politics of early American novels in much less favorable terms. For these roughly neo-Marxist critics, the shift from republicanism and its communitarian ethos to liberalism is unwelcome since it brought into being the individualist culture of modern capitalism. For Ziff, Rice, and Gilmore, early American novels’ negotiation or even embrace of this ideological shift makes them complicit with the rise to dominance of a capitalist worldview. For them, formal tensions in literary texts signal their individualizing depoliticization, their uneasy adjustments to ideological strains in the new republic, and, ultimately, their collusion with an emerging liberalcapitalist order. In these critics’ hands, the novel becomes “almost an agent of ideological seduction” (Fluck, “Aesthetics,” 183). For Fluck, the main difference between most criticism of the 1980s and that of the 1990s is that they attribute different political meanings to textual contradictions and inconsistencies: Basically, there are two answers. One is to consider discrepancies, ruptures, or inner tensions as a source of resistance through which the text undermines norms of order, coherence, rationality etc. The other is to see them as inner contradiction that reflects the strain of ideological adjustment. In keeping with general developments, the first 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0012 198 Philipp Schweighauser view is gradually replaced by the second in recent theories of the early American novel. (184) The value of Fluck’s essay lies primarily in providing a splendid, poised survey of criticism on the early American novel from its beginnings in the 1940s to the 1990s. He masterfully synthesizes the extant criticism on the novel, arranging critics into groups (‘infancy thesis/ cultural document’; ‘political criticism/ subversion theory’; ‘political criticism/ cooptation-and-containment theory’), without losing sight of internal differences within groups. For instance, in discussing Petter’s The Early American Novel and Lowenstein’s The Art of Improvement: Form and Function in the American Novel, 1789-1801 (1971), Fluck groups both into the ‘infancy thesis/ cultural document’ camp while stressing that whereas Petter justifies his turn to early American novels simply because they are part of American literary history, Lowenstein insists on the genre’s educational purpose. Similarly, Fluck notes that while many critics of the 1980s - most prominently Davidson, Fliegelman, and Elliott - embraced the early American novel for its emancipatory politics, others - most notably Jeffrey Rubin-Dorsky and Cynthia Jordan - critiqued these texts for their less than progressive, often patriarchal stances. Likewise, Fluck points out that while both Ziff and Gilmore belong in the neo-Marxist camp that values republicanism over liberalism, Ziff argues that there is a homology between literary representation and economic subtext (the shift toward liberalism) whereas Gilmore argues that the early novel is characterized by inner tensions because it is “the site of a struggle between republicanism and individualism, between modernizing tendencies and a discomfort with individualism” (177). Fluck not only synthesizes criticism on the early American novel but also stakes out his own claims, primarily by way of a critique of earlier scholars’ positions. Thus, he notes that from within the ‘textual politics’ paradigm that unites the critics of the 1980s and 1990s, “one can take any theme, motif or narrative element at will and declare it to be the signifier of a hidden political subtext. (…) In this way, any textual aspect can become a metonymy of ‘reality,’ depending on the interpreter’s political views and convictions. (…) [T]he consequence is a political voluntarism in which critics project those political meanings into the early American novel that best suit their needs” (191). Though he does not state this explicitly, this critique takes the American critics to task for a presentism that projects late-twentieth-century ideological convictions onto late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth-century literary texts. Fluck does not go as far as calling the critics he discusses ahistorical but his critique tends in that direction. Fluck’s second critique is closely related to the first: While American critics obviously traffic in political criticism, the 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0012 Fluck and the Early American Novel 199 terms they use - “republicanism, liberalism, individualism, privatization, market capitalism, bourgeoisie and the nation-state” (255) - are sweeping and remain underdeveloped, as they are not tied to theories of modernity. Taking aim at the critics of the 1990s, Fluck adds his third, sharp critique as he argues that “[r]ecent theories of the early American novel have created a democratic Eden before the fall into capitalism in order to account for the painful obsolescence of their own political views and to explain their lack of resonance. In this sense, these theories have become hibernating places for a politics of leftist nostalgia” (193). The “democratic Eden” Fluck refers to here is a world structured and dominated by the communitarian ethos of republicanism. Again, presentism rears its head. Fluck gives his critique of recent theories of the early American novel one final twist when, in the essay’s last paragraph, he notes that the two major camps - the feminist one represented by Davidson and others and the neo-Marxist one represented by Gilmore and others - exist side by side rather than engaging with one another. This enables “current political criticism” to “liv[e] in the best of possible worlds: it can authorize itself by the tacit claim that it provides a representative analysis of American society without actually having to demonstrate this” (194). In the end, Fluck reasons, the current political criticism is not really political as it uses ‘politics’ as a shorthand “for a familiar anti-bourgeois attitude. At present, at least, it is hardly more” (194). What we can see at work in Fluck’s essay is a quintessentially European Americanist dissection of U.S. Americanist literary-critical discourse. Arguably, such a European stance is more hesitant in attributing political meanings to literary texts - and, I argue below, aesthetic treatises - and more attuned to divergences (instead of homologies or mimetic reflections) between literary forms and ideological subtexts. European Americanists also tend to pay greater attention than their American colleagues to the “politics of form” (183), which is at the heart of Fluck’s concerns. By way of contrast, Fluck admonishes, major U.S. critics of the early American novel consider “textual surface (…) only as vehicle for the political subtext” (191). Fluck published his essay in 2000. How can we update his account almost a quarter of a century later? Generally speaking, while the political orientation of literary criticism remains key, the focus has shifted from the liberalismrepublicanism debate to incorporating transnational frameworks. Yet there are other developments that already started in decades covered by Fluck’s article. A major input came from a book briefly discussed by Fluck: Michael Warner’s The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth- Century America (1990). Informed by Habermasian principles, Warner’s research spurred a wave of subsequent contributions that explored the interplay between 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0012 200 Philipp Schweighauser oral and print culture in shaping the American public sphere. Works such as Fliegelman’s Declaring Independence: Jefferson, Natural Language, and the Culture of Performance (1993), David S. Shields’s Civil Tongues and Polite Letters in British America (1997), Sandra Gustafson’s Eloquence Is Power: Oratory & Performance in Early America (2000), and Trish Loughran’s The Republic in Print: Print Culture in the Age of U.S. Nation Building, 1770-1870 (2007) collectively expanded the scope of investigation beyond Habermas’s bourgeois public sphere, delving into a plurality of smaller public spheres and shedding light on the significant role of women in the creation of public spheres. In Dena Goodman’s words in her introduction to a special issue of Eighteenth-Century Studies (1996), During the last six years there has been substantial debate about the validity of Habermas’s theory: about the importance and significance of his Marxism, for example, and about the existence or sociological meaning of such central features of his theory as public opinion and even the public sphere itself. Questions have been raised about the possibility of multiple publics beyond the literate, ‘bourgeois’ one privileged by Habermas, about women’s role in the public sphere, and about the way in which the national cultures of England, France, and Germany figure in Habermas’s basically Marxist chronology, which sees England as in the lead and Germany pulling up the rear. (1-2) Furthermore, since the mid-1980s, a group of scholars has shifted their attention away from the prevailing New England-centric focus, as advocated by Philip F. Gura in his influential companion essays “The Study of Colonial American Literature, 1966-1987” and “Early American Literature at the New Century.” Exemplified by Jack P. Greene’s Pursuits of Happiness: The Social Development of Early Modern British Colonies and the Formation of American Culture (1988), Greene and J. R. Pole’s Colonial British America: Essays in the New History of the Early Modern Era (1984), Philip D. Morgan’s Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry (1998), and Carla Mulford’s Teaching the Literatures of Early America (1999), these revisionist accounts have significantly expanded their focus to encompass regions beyond New England such as Nouvelle France, Spanish America, the Caribbean, the Middle Colonies, the Chesapeake, and the Lower South. Moreover, since the 1990s, another group of scholars has deliberately shifted the narrative away from a nation-state-centered understanding of early America. This trajectory aligns with broader developments within American Studies, encompassing the ‘hemispheric,’ ‘post-nationalist,’ ‘transnational,’ or 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0012 Fluck and the Early American Novel 201 2 For two brief accounts of the transnational turn, see Fishkin and Rowe. 3 I am seconded in this assessment by Edward Cahill and Edward Larkin, who postulate three reasons why early American studies has not witnessed an aesthetic turn: “antiaesthetic stigma” (which is due to the disparagement of aesthetic concerns as elitist and/ or trivial), “conceptual ambiguity” (which plagues philosophical inquiry into aesthetics), and “material conditions” (since scholarships in early American studies tend to go to research projects that have a historicist bent) (239-41). ‘New American Studies’ paradigm. 2 Drawing on concepts from post-colonial studies, this body of work situates American literary and cultural production within a broader geographical context, embracing Africa, Europe, South and Central America, and the West Indies. Inspired by the scholarship of William Spengemann, Paul Gilroy, Ralph Bauer, and others, this younger generation of critics challenges the exceptionalist approach of earlier American Studies, reexamining the transatlantic and other contextual factors that shape American literature. Notable contributions in this vein include Vincent Carretta and Philip Gould’s Genius in Bondage: Literature of the Early Black Atlantic (2001), Kirsten Silva Gruesz’s Ambassadors of Culture: The Transamerican Origins of Latino Writing (2002), Nancy Shoemaker’s A Strange Likeness: Becoming Red and White in Eighteenth-Century North America (2004), Sean X. Goudie’s Creole America: The West Indies and the Formation of Literature and Culture in the New Republic (2006), Eric Slauter’s “History, Literature, and the Atlantic World” (2008), and Bauer and José Antonio Mazzotti’s Creole Subjects in the Colonial Americas: Empires, Texts, Identities (2009). Is there a common denominator to the developments I sketch in the preceding paragraphs? Yes, there is, in the sense that all the scholars discussed above practice political-historical forms of criticism. In fact, over the past twenty-five years, the field has increasingly shifted away from studying the relationship between literary forms and ideological subtexts. 3 Instead, recent criticism of the early American novel views literary texts as ‘expressions’ or ‘symptoms’ of transnational phenomena. This approach is evident in the rise of new economic criticism, as exemplified by Eric Wertheimer’s Underwriting: The Poetics of In‐ surance in America, 1722-1872 (2006) and Stephen Shapiro’s splendid The Culture and Commerce of the Early American Novel: Reading the Atlantic World-System (2008). Additionally, scholars like Martin Brückner have introduced cultural geography into early American studies, as seen in The Geographic Revolution in Early America: Maps, Literacy, and National Identity (2006). Collectively, these studies contextualize literary production and reception within vast geopolitical and socioeconomic frameworks that are said to profoundly influence the form and social function of literary works. Consequently, literary texts are viewed as 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0012 202 Philipp Schweighauser products shaped primarily by extraliterary forces, and works of the imagination are examined as historical evidence, with literary and social forms seen as homologous. In Beautiful Deceptions, I make the case that it may be time to return to questions of aesthetics in the study of the early American novel (and contemporaneous illusionist art such as Patience Wright’s wax sculptures and Charles Willson Peale’s and his son Raphaelle Peale’s trompe l’oeil paintings). Such a return to aesthetics, however, does not mean a return to the concerns of the novel’s first critics from the 1940s to the 1970s, for whom aesthetics first and foremost meant judgments of taste. For me, ‘aesthetics’ first and foremost (though not exclusively) denotes two things: the theory of natural and artistic beauty; the science of sensuous cognition. The latter meaning of the term was introduced by Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten in 1735 when he coined ‘aesthetics’ in Meditationes philosophicae de nonnullis ad poema pertinentibus. Baumgarten theorized aesthetics as “a science which might direct the lower cognitive faculty in knowing things sensately” (§115, 78) and defined it as “the science of perception” (§116, 78). It is in the opening paragraph of his two-volume masterpiece Aesthetica (1750/ 1758) where Baumgarten provides the most commonly cited original definition of aesthetics: “AESTHETICA (the‐ oria liberalium artium, gnoseologia inferior, ars pulchre cogitandi, ars analogi rationis) est scientia cognitionis sensitivae” (§1, I: 60). In Jeffrey Barnouw’s translation, which includes helpful annotations in square brackets, “Aesthetics, as the theory of the liberal arts, lower-level epistemology [gnoseologia inferior], the art of thinking finely [literally, beautifully, ars pulchre cogitandi], and the art of the analogy of reason [i.e., the associative or natural-sign-based capacity of empirical inference common to man and higher animals], is the science of sensuous cognition” (324). In anglophone literary scholarship, Baumgarten is rarely referenced and if he is, he is often relegated to a footnote or two. This might have to do with the fact that his opus magnum, Aesthetica, is written in Latin and has not been translated into English. (It has been translated into German.) Notwithstanding, several late twentiethand early twenty-first-century attempts to define ‘aesthetics’ do acknowledge that it is concerned with sensuous perception and cognition. Consider Terry Eagleton’s definition at the beginning of The Ideology of the Aesthetic: Aesthetics is born as a discourse of the body. (…) That territory is nothing less than the whole of our sensate life together - the business of affections and aversions, of how the world strikes the body on its sensory surfaces, of that which takes root in 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0012 Fluck and the Early American Novel 203 the gaze and the guts and all that arises from our most banal, biological insertion into the world. (13) In a more recent essay, Susan Buck-Morss seconds Eagleton: “The original field of aesthetics is not art but reality - corporeal material nature. (…) It is a form of cognition, achieved through taste, touch, hearing, seeing, smell - the whole corporeal sensorium” (6). While Eagleton diligently works himself through the history of aesthetics and seeks to do justice to the thinkers he discusses, the net effect of his book has been a disparagement of aesthetic discourse, in particular its focus on taste, as elitist and exclusionary. Since Eagleton published his book in 1991, two handfuls of critics have called for a return to questions of aesthetics. Among them are Christopher Looby and Cindy Weinstein, who give a “heuristic” (as opposed to a philosophical) definition of the term in the introduction to their edited volume American Literature’s Aesthetic Dimensions (2012): The play of imagination, the exploration of fantasy, the recognition and description of literary form, the materiality of literary inscription and publication, the pleasure of the text, sensuous experience in general, the appreciation of beauty, the adjudication and expression of taste, the broad domain of feeling or affect, or some particular combination of several of these elements. (4) Looby and Weinstein base their definition on the meanings attributed to ‘aesthetics’ by the contributors to their essay collection. Here too, the inclusion of “sensuous experience in general” refers back to the beginning of aesthetics in Baumgarten even if he is mentioned only in passing. The original, Baumgartian understanding of aesthetics is also evoked by Elizabeth Maddock Dillon in her splendid essay “Atlantic Aesthesis: Books and Sensus Communis in the New World” (2016), though she references Kant rather than Baumgarten. I take the aesthetic to concern the formation of communities of sense - communities in which consensus about the value of sensory information (such as judgments regarding beauty) binds people together. This definition of the aesthetic draws on but departs from the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, who describes the aesthetic in terms of ‘sensus communis’ or common sense. By ‘sensus communis’ Kant does not mean common sense in its vernacular meaning so much as sensing in common - or shared sensation and, importantly, shared judgment regarding that sensation. For Kant, such judgments have universal validity: on my reading, however, the shared terrain of aesthetic value is one that creates community (as well as exclusions from it) rather than one that emerges from it. For this reason, the formation of a sensus communis should be understood as an ongoing process (rather than a singular event) and aesthetic 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0012 204 Philipp Schweighauser judgment, in turn, must be understood as far from universal. This account of the procedural force of the aesthetic is one that leads me to choose the term aesthesis over aesthetic in my title: I use the term aesthesis to signal an activity (of judgment, of shared sensation and meaning making, of community formation) rather than to remark upon the quality of an object or experience. (367; emphases in original) Designed to explore the materiality and representational power of books and how ‘communities of sense’ are created in the exchange of books in the Atlantic world, ‘aesthesis’ is a felicitous coinage though I would like to learn more about how it differs from ‘aisthesis.’ By binding aesthetics to communal practices, Dillon moves the term into the realm of politics understood as the emergence and government of poleis, of communities. This is exemplary of a more general trend in early American studies, where turns toward the aesthetic are embedded in a primary political-historical project. In Looby and Weinstein’s words, the “history” of aesthetics “preserves the conviction that social and political life always has a sensory and perceptual dimension” (8). In her powerful unpublished dissertation “Novels of the Nation: Literary Theory, Post-Revolutionary Republicanism, and the Rise of the Novel in America, 1789-1812” (2014), Katherine Anne Webster, who lists a number of contributions that initiated a return to aesthetics in the study of early American literary culture (Weinstein and Looby; Shields; Slauter; Cahill), argues along similar lines: This dissertation recovers the intellectual history that accorded historical, national, and political relevance to concepts like beauty, taste, and literary pleasure in the early national period and reveals the ways in which America’s first novelists interrogated the central notion that a love of literature could be the cornerstone of a democratic society. (ii-iii) As Webster argues persuasively, “taste was a matter of national concern” (20) and “the bedrock upon which virtuous society was built” (96). Early American novelists, Webster adds, “saw literary discourse (…) as the structuring rationale behind an entire social order” (249). This intertwinement of the aesthetic and the political - which Webster traces back to two influential neoclassical rhetorical works, Charles Rollin’s Method of Teaching and Studying the Belles Lettres (1734) and Hugh Blair’s Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (1783) - also informs the monograph that I consider the most accomplished return to aesthetics in recent early American studies. In his book Liberty of the Imagination: Aesthetic Theory, Literary Form, and Politics in the Early United States (2012), Edward Cahill devotes individual chapters to genres of revolutionary and early national writing. These genres include poetry, landscape writing, political treatises, novels, and literary criti‐ 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0012 Fluck and the Early American Novel 205 4 See also my review of Cahill’s book. cism. Cahill’s astute comprehension of eighteenth-century aesthetic theory and his exceptional close reading skills shine through as he presents compelling new interpretations. Cahill intelligently observes that, similar to early American political discourse, early aesthetic theory is influenced by a “dialectic of liberty” (36) that celebrates the freedom of the imagination while simultaneously emphasizing the necessity of restraining that freedom to prevent it from deteriorating into “license.” Expounding upon this dialectic forms the core of Cahill’s splendid work, as he delves into the politics inherent within aesthetics - the interplay between liberty and constraint - before intertwining the aesthetic with realpolitik. What distinguishes Cahill’s scholarship from much of the existing research in early American studies is not so much his recognition of the subversive power of the aesthetic, but rather his commitment to honoring the intricacy and contradictions of its inherent political nuances. Furthermore, while Cahill acknowledges his indebtedness to prominent theorists of ‘the ideology of the aesthetic’ camp such as Eagleton and Pierre Bourdieu and more recent explorations of aesthetics by scholars like Isobel Armstrong and Elaine Scarry, he traverses the social and political implications of early American writers’ utilization of aesthetic categories in all their complexity. In doing this, Cahill resists the temptation to align himself strictly with either Eagleton’s and Bourdieu’s critique of aesthetic ideology or Armstrong’s and Scarry’s postulation of the democratic or emancipatory potential of beauty. 4 Elizabeth Dill’s Erotic Citizens: Sex and the Embodied Subject in the Antebellum Novel (2019) is less attuned to aesthetics in its own right but develops the valuable concept of ‘aesthetic work.’ Dill analyzes the ‘ruin narratives’ of sentimental novels such as William Hill Brown’s The Power of Sympathy and Hanna Webster Foster’s The Coquette (but also, amongst others, Samuel Richardson’s earlier Clarissa and Harriet Jacobs’s later Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl) to add to scholarly accounts of sympathy as a democratizing force. Dill suggests that illicit sex in these novels provides a model of extracontractual, non-individual relationship between self and other that functions as a metonym for citizenship in the new nation. What comes into being in ruin narratives is not the “sovereign individual” but the “sympathetic subject” (17). It is in this context and in a dialogue with both eighteenth-century moral sense philosophy and Jane Tompkins’s understanding of the ‘cultural work’ popular fictions perform that Dill defines the ‘aesthetic work’ that early American novels do as “somatic work”: Thus aesthetic work is somatic work, and its inclination toward community inflects it with a fundamentally political valence. As the ruin narrative sees it, the pleasure 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0012 206 Philipp Schweighauser experienced by the congress among extra-contractual bodies is thus not an act of sin at all but a moral corrective, the body remedying the political error of yoking bodies together by contract. (11) Based on this understanding of ‘aesthetic work,’ Dill attributes political meaning to the representation of illicit, i.e., extramarital sex in the new nation’s first novels: The stuff of nations is the stuff of bodies: this is the guiding principle of the ruin genre. The aesthetic work of the illicitly sexed body functions as a prevalent model for nationbuilding unions in the Atlantic Enlightenment; the novels of ruin that proliferated as the new American republic was taking shape demonstrate that the authors who wrestled with what it means to form a democratic union saw the sexually ruined body as the best means of imagining one. (216) In performing their aesthetic work, then, ruin narratives position themselves with moral sense philosophers such as Anthony Ashley Cooper, the Third Earl of Shaftesbury; David Hume; and Adam Smith instead of social contract theorists such as Thomas Hobbes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. However, for early American novelists, it is not merely an innate moral sense, our ‘nature,’ that binds society together but also the somatic experience, the emotional and physical bonds, of illicit sexual desire: “If the body forges social bonds through the laws of attraction, the idea that we need a social contract to do the same work is absurd” (Dill 65). It is in this vein that the ruin narrative “us[es] sex to illustrate the sympathetic subject’s sociability” (Dill 71). For the purpose of this essay, Dill’s engagement with Jane Tompkins’s notion of ‘cultural work’ is most interesting: Instead of looking at what Jane Tompkins so famously called the ‘cultural work’ of the novel, in Erotic Citizens, I am proposing that we look to what I am calling the aesthetic work these texts produce. For the purposes of this book, the aesthetic can be defined as the mutually generative, indivisible worlds of sensate and sentient experience. The term aesthetic in fact come from the Greek aisthetikos, which means perception by way of the senses. Though aesthetics is commonly understood to convey ideas about discernment and beauty emerging out of the mid-eighteenth-century study of art, another branch of Enlightenment thinkers saw it rather as the examination of the sensory life and its attendant emotional impact. These were philosophers who were interested in the political power of feeling and who began to consider the influence of the body’s pleasures within the realm of virtue. Indeed, they saw the body as predisposed by providential design to experience the good as the pleasurable. Our attractions, they argued, are moral things, and direct us toward not just the good but the common good: we form 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0012 Fluck and the Early American Novel 207 bonds with one another and do what is best for others because it gives us pleasure to do so. Pleasure works on and through the body to produce attractions, and our most fundamental attraction is toward one another. toward the formation of community. Thus aesthetic work is somatic work, and its inclination toward community inflects it with a fundamentally political valence. As the ruin narrative sees it, the pleasure experienced by the congress among extra-contractual bodies is thus not an act of sin at all but a moral corrective, the body remedying the political error of yoking bodies together by contract. (11; emphases in original) While Dill confines Baumgarten to one footnote (222n. 9), her reflections on “the mutually generative, indivisible worlds of sensate and sentient experience” takes us back to the earliest meaning of aesthetics. As we read Dill’s valuable book, we can also witness an intertwining of aesthetics and politics that is characteristic of recent explorations of the aesthetic in early American studies. I welcome these various returns to the original meaning of ‘aesthetics’ but wish to point out that Baumgarten is misunderstood when he is credited with being the first to “employ the term aesthetics to apply to matters of taste rather than mere sensation” (Klein 444n. 1) or when he is said to be concerned with “philosophical questions of taste” (Cahill 3). Dill is likewise mistaken when she writes, in the footnote referenced above, that “[i]n terms of the former understanding of aesthetics, one thinks of William Hogarth’s The Analysis of Beauty (1753) and Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten’s Aesthetica, both of which are more about matters of taste and the class values imbued within them” (222n. 9). Baumgarten is important first and foremost for establishing aesthetics as the “science of sensuous cognition,” a discipline that reaches far beyond matters of taste. Moreover, an engagement with the foundational text of aesthetics (or any other treatise on aesthetics if read on its own terms) cautions us against conflating aesthetics and politics and thus succumbing to what Fluck calls “political voluntarism” (254). In making these observations, I am inspired by Fluck’s “From Aesthetics to Political Criticism: Theories of the Early American Novel.” Not only does he urge his readers not to neglect questions of aesthetics - he does that elsewhere, for instance in his splendid essay “The Search for Distance: Negation and Negativity in Wolfgang Iser’s Literary Theory” (2000), but his writing also encourages me to develop an appreciative yet critical attitude toward recent trends in U.S. (Early) American studies. And for that, I am grateful. 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0012 208 Philipp Schweighauser Works Cited Armstrong, Isobel. The Radical Aesthetic. Oxford: Blackwell, 2000. 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