Postconventionality in the literature of the Civil War

• Main Author: Perkins, Joe Lewis
• Format: Dissertation
• Language: English
• Published: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses 01-01-1994
• Subjects: American history; American literature; American studies; Habermas, Jurgen; Stowe, Harriet Beecher (1811-1896)
• ISBN: 9798208355008

This dissertation looks at the functions of conventions in the literature and politics of America during the decade before and the decade after the Civil War and how writers and politicians make use of these conventions in order to create and manage public opinion. This study assess the effectiveness of different kinds of opinion management in the renewed interest in race and gender relations at mid century, with the most skillful shapers of popular ideas about freedom essentially dismantling their own rhetorical devices after their messages have become part of popular thought. Attitudes toward the treatment of minorities and women can be categorized according to Habermas' preconventional, conventional, and postconventional consciousnesses and the Lincoln/Douglas debates bring to a climax a dispute between two different ideological orientations in the ongoing discussion of race relations and the nature of democracy--the conventional and the postconventional. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Lydia Maria Child, and Harriet Jacobs are responsible for a body of literature concerned with the reform of ethical and moral treatment of minorities and women during the mid nineteenth-century and their writings make use of literary and political conventions in order to pave the way for an arena of mediation and reconciliation that doesn't depend on traditional or conventional moral categories. These writers strive for a postconventional and hence non-ideological environment in which autonomous individuals no longer define themselves or their ideas in terms of their relationship to sources of authority or to the politics of American individualism.