From Classicism to Neoclassicism: Cicero, slavery, and fictions of personhood in the writings of Charles Brockden Brown

UnrestrictedFrom Classicism to Neoclassicism: Cicero, Slavery, and Fictions of Personhood in the Writings of Charles Brockden Brown argues that the person of Cicero and the medium of Ciceronian oratory are useful for thinking about and working through the unsettled notions of personhood, law, and slavery in the U.S. during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The questions taken into consideration from a three-pronged analysis. The first works out the specific concerns in law regarding the legal notion of iniuria and its impact on the definition of the slave's status in ancient Rome. The second discusses the important details of Cicero's political ascent as a statesman and orator in antiquity and describes how thinking about Cicero became widespread and broadly diffused during the post-Revolutionary period in the U.S. Finally, the third form of thought that governs my inquiry is the examination of the persistence of the Ciceronian motif within the fictional narratives of Charles Brockden Brown. Viewing each of these questions in light of the specific legal crisis over race and racial identification, my dissertation explores how the appropriation of Cicero is being used to broaden, challenge, and foreclose notions of personhood and racial hierarchies in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in the U.S