Berserk Violence, Racial Vengeance, and Settler Colonialism in American Writing from Franklin to Melville

Berserk Violence, Racial Vengeance, and Settler Colonialism in American Writing from Franklin to Melville studies the literary and cultural tradition of the “Indian Hater” in American writing from the decades between the Revolution and the Civil War.In dozens of short stories, novels, poems, plays, and historical publications, Indian Haters were white settlers on the western frontier who to kill all “Indians” to avenge the deaths of family members at the hands of a few.As they engage their episodes in racial violence, they attain transcendent racial powers based in traditions of historical white barbarism and the powers of the legendary berserker, the crazed Nordic super-warrior.Indian Haters' obsession with genocidal retribution reflected and participated in important conversations in the new nation about race, violence, nation, and masculinity, as well as the role of the emergent mass print culture in the distribution of propaganda, disinformation, and misrepresentation.At the same t