Linda Liu (PhD candidate, English) will present a chapter from her dissertation titled “The Idea of Conservatism.” Nichole Nomura (Ph.D. candidate, English) will serve as Linda's respondent.

Here is what Linda has to say about her work:

“Since its emergence in the early nineteenth century, conservatism has become a central ideology in U.S. politics and culture. Little work thus far, however, has fully considered how conservatism’s historical emergence coincided with some of the most crucial years of the development of American literary and cultural identity. My dissertation studies this intersection between conservatism and American literature in the first half of the nineteenth century. Using analyses of archival materials and literary texts, my research uncovers the surprisingly literary means—the narrative forms, affects, and rhetorical strategies—through which conservatism evolved from its tentative introduction after the French Revolution to quickly become entrenched in the modern imagination as a natural, even Newtonian force against progressive change. I argue that, especially in the United States, writers like Nathaniel Hawthorne, James Fenimore Cooper, and Frederick Douglass created narrative forms that engage with this new ideology. My analyses of these forms reveal how their works both inscribe and reveal the ways in which conservatism becomes embedded in American conceptions of political reality.”