Dealing with Thomas Paine's Common Sense (1776), John Trumbull's M'Fingal (1776-82), Philip Freneau's "The British-Prison Ship" (1781), J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur's Letters from an American Farmer (1782), and Washington Irving's "Rip Van Winkle" (1819-20), Steven Blakemore breaks new ground in assessing the strategies of subversion and intertextuality used during the American Revolution. Blakemore also crystallizes the historical contexts that link these works together – contexts that have been missed or overlooked by critics and scholars. The five works additionally illuminate issues of history (The Norman Conquest, the English Civil War, and the French Revolution) and gender as they impinge on American-revolutionary discourse. The result is five new readings of significant revolutionary-era works that suggest fruitful entries into other literatures of the Revolution. Blakemore demonstrates the nexus between literature and history in the revolutionary era and how it created an intertextual dialogue in the formation of the first postcolonial critiques of the British Empire.
In Beyond 1776, ten humanities scholars consider the American Revolution within a global framework. The foundation of the United States was deeply enmeshed with shifting alliances and multiple actors, with politics saturated by imaginative literature, and with ostensible bilateral negotiations that were, in fact, shaped by speculation about realignments in geopolitical power. To reanimate these intricate and often indirect connections, this volume uncovers the influences of people across disparate sites both during and after independence. The book centers first on the migration of ideas across the Atlantic, particularly among intellectuals and through print. In this section, scholars focus on how various European countries or cliques appropriate the Revolution to reanimate an array of national, local, or cosmopolitan affiliations. The essays in the second section articulate how revolutions fostered surprising exchanges in, for example the West Indies and in the first penal colonies of Australia, along the Celtic fringe and Pacific Rim, and in the vast territories through which goods circulated. Taken as a whole, this collection answers the persistent calls from scholars to move beyond the boundaries defined by the nation-state or periodization to rethink narratives of U.S. foundations. The contributors examine a range of texts, from novels and drama to diplomatic correspondence, letters of common sailors, political treatises, newspapers, accounting ledgers, naval records, and burial rituals (many from non-Anglophone sources). Beyond 1776 will appeal to scholars seeking to understand contact and exchange in the late eighteenth century. It indexes how different intellectuals in the period deployed the Revolution as a point of connection; follows the dispersal of print books, guns, slaves, and memorabilia; and evaluates literary responses to the new republic. The book puts in conversation scholars of literature, theater, history, modern languages, American studies, political science, transatlanticism, cultural studies, women’s studies, postcolonialism, and geography. Contributors: Jeng-Guo Chen, Academia Sinica, Taiwan * Matthew Dziennik, United States Naval Academy * Miranda Green-Barteet, University of Western Ontario * Carine Lounissi, Université de Rouen-Normandie * Therese-Marie Meyer, Martin-Luther-University of Halle- Wittenberg * Maria O’Malley, University of Nebraska, Kearney * Denys Van Renen, University of Nebraska, Kearney * Ed Simon, Bentley University * Wyger Velema, University of Amsterdam * Leonard von Morzé, University of Massachusetts, Boston
This book endeavours to understand the seemingly direct link between utopianism and the USA, discussing novels that have never been brought together in this combination before, even though they all revolve around intentional communities: Imlay’s The Emigrants (1793), Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance (1852), Howland’s Papas Own Girl (1874), Griggs’s Imperium in Imperio (1899), and Du Bois’s The Quest of the Silver Fleece (1911). They relate nation and utopia not by describing perfect societies, but by writing about attempts to immediately live radically different lives. Signposting the respective communal history, the readings provide a literary perspective to communal studies, and add to a deeply necessary historicization for strictly literary approaches to US utopianism, and for studies that focus on Pilgrims/Puritans/Founding Fathers as utopian practitioners. This book therefore highlights how the authors evaluated the USA’s utopian potential and traces the nineteenth-century development of the utopian imagination from various perspectives.
The purpose of this volume is to discuss the concept of citizenship—in terms of its origins, its meanings, and its contemporary place and relevance in American democracy, and within a global context. The authors in this collection wrestle with the connection of citizenship to major tensions between liberty and equality, dynamism and stability, and civic disagreement and social cohesion. The essays also raise fundamental questions about the relationship between citizenship and leadership, and invite further reflection on the features of citizenship and civic leadership under the American Constitution. Finally, this collection offers various suggestions about how to revitalize citizenship and civic leadership through an education that is conducive to a renewal of American civic practices and institutions.
Phillis Wheatley, the African-born slave poet, is considered by many to be a pioneer of Anglo-American poetics. This study argues how in her 1773 POEMS, Wheatley uses John Milton's poetry to develop an idealistic vision of an emerging Anglo-American republic comprised of Britons, Africans, Native Americans, and women.
One of America’s Founding Fathers, Thomas Paine is best remembered as the pamphleteer who inspired the American Revolution. Yet few also know him as an eighteenth-century poet of considerable repute. In The Field of Imagination, Scott Cleary offers the first book on Paine’s poetry, exploring how poetry written both by and about Paine is central to understanding his development as a political theorist. Despite his claim in The Age of Reason that he was abandoning poetry because it led too much into the "field of imagination," Paine never completely left poetry behind. He took advantage of his position as editor of the Pennsylvania Magazine to situate his poetry in relation to the magazine’s tacit support of American independence. He drew on two British poets, James Thomson and Charles Churchill, to provide revealing epigraphs for his major early works in support of that independence, and in turn he himself became an influence on early American poets such as Joel Barlow and Philip Freneau. Paine’s poetry has until now been largely relegated to the status of scholarly curiosity. But whether through his own poetry, his thoughts on the place and function of poetry in the Age of Reason, or his deep influence on the poetry of the early American republic, Paine’s involvement in poetical craft provides a lens onto the unique and tempestuous literary culture of the eighteenth century.
Powers of chaos accompany any order of the human world, being the force against which this order is set. Human experience of history is two-fold. There is history ruled by chaos and history ruled by order. "History" occurs in a continuous flow of both histories. The dialectics of life unto nothingness/creation, struggles for order/order achieved is unceasingly actual. In exploring it, within a wide interdisciplinary and transcultural range, this book reaches beyond a conventional "philosophy of history". It deals with the chaotic as well as the cosmic part of the human historical experience. It stages this drama through the tales that religious, mythical, literary, philosophical, folkloristic, and historiographical sources tell and which are retold and interpreted here. From early on humans wished to know where, why, and wherefore all started and took place. Couldn’t the dialectics between chaos and order be meaningful? Couldn’t they assume a productive role as to the world’s precarious event? Power, strife, guilt, divine grace and revelation, literary symbolization, as well as storytelling are discussed in this book. Philosophy, political theory, theology, religious studies, and literary studies will greatly benefit from its width and density.
Reading These United States explores the relationship between early American literature and federalism in the early decades of the republic. As a federal republic, the United States constituted an unusual model of national unity, defined by the representation of its variety rather than its similarities. Taking the federal structure of the nation as a foundational point, Keri Holt examines how popular print—including almanacs, magazines, satires, novels, and captivity narratives—encouraged citizens to recognize and accept the United States as a union of differences. Challenging the prevailing view that early American print culture drew citizens together by establishing common bonds of language, sentiment, and experience, she argues that early American literature helped define the nation, paradoxically, by drawing citizens apart—foregrounding, rather than transcending, the regional, social, and political differences that have long been assumed to separate them. The book offers a new approach for studying print nationalism that transforms existing arguments about the political and cultural function of print in the early United States, while also offering a provocative model for revising the concept of the nation itself. Holt also breaks new ground by incorporating an analysis of literature into studies of federalism and connects the literary politics of the early republic with antebellum literary politics—a bridge scholars often struggle to cross.
With more than 1,300 cross-referenced entries covering every aspect of the American Revolution, this definitive scholarly reference covers the causes, course, and consequences of the war and the political, social, and military origins of the nation. This authoritative and complete encyclopedia covers not only the eight years of the American Revolutionary War (1775–1783) but also the decades leading up to the war, beginning with the French and Indian War, and the aftermath of the conflict, with an emphasis on the early American Republic. Volumes one through four contain a series of overview essays on the causes, course, and consequences of the American Revolution, followed by impeccably researched A–Z entries that address the full spectrum of political, social, and military matters that arose from the conflict. Each entry is cross-referenced to other entries and also lists books for further reading. In addition, there is a detailed bibliography, timeline, and glossary. A fifth volume is devoted to primary sources, each of which is accompanied by an insightful introduction that places the document in its proper historical context. The primary sources help readers to understand the myriad motivations behind the American Revolution; the diplomatic, military, and political maneuvering that took place during the conflict; and landmark documents that shaped the founding and early development of the United States.
