The Affective Postwar

This chapter examines an overlooked connection between patriotism and paranoia, arguing that patriotic love conditions suspicion and enmity born from perennial uncertainty over others’ love of nation. In John Neal’s Seventy-Six (1823), love of country breeds both suspicious minds and suspicious affects. This historical romance of the Revolutionary War demonstrates that paranoia is a set of affects in addition to the mental properties for which it is more commonly understood. For this reason, paranoid patriotism becomes transmissible among persons – and in literature, through style. This observation is significant because literary criticism has traditionally emphasized paranoia’s affinities with narrative, particularly conspiracy theory, and, more recently, with interpretation, namely, the paranoid’s search for coherent explanation and order, or the hermeneutics of suspicion. Neal’s novel insists that we also recognize paranoia as a trait of style.