Introduction: Phobia’s Metaphor

Abstract

This introduction offers readers an overarching, etymological history of phobia’s rise as a popular diagnosis in American medicine and literature. It explores phobia’s long association with hydrophobia (the historic name for rabies), phobia’s dependence upon metaphorical allusions to rabies as the morpheme first transitioned into a variable suffix, phobia’s proliferation as a term of political satire during the early national and antebellum periods, the concept’s use in antislavery print culture to address race prejudice, and the postbellum influence of sexology, neurology, microbiology, and anthropology on phobia’s evolving definition as a psychological state and variable diagnosis. It proposes the “history of affect” as a method capable of tracing the literary forms that affect takes within material texts. In addition, it claims a “deviant philology” as an approach to recovering the contingent meanings of terms denoting “the aberrant” within language, used to define or to challenge consensus around societal norms. Along the way, it offers six valences key to understanding phobia’s eighteenth- and nineteenth-century connotations.