From the Revolutionary War to the Civil War, a familiar scene
appears and reappears in American literature: a speaker stands
before a crowd of men and women, attempting to mitigate their
natural suspicions in order to form a body of federated wills. In
this important study of the relationship of literature and
politics, Mark Patterson argues that this scene restates political
issues in literary terms and embodies the essential problems of
American democracy facing both politicians and writers: What is
autonomy? How does representation work? Where does true authority
lie? Beginning with the debate over ratification of the United
States Constitution, Patterson follows out the complex literary
consequences of these questions.
A work of literary history and criticism, this study also offers
valuable insights into matters of political and literary theory. In
separate chapters on Benjamin Frankin, Hugh Henry Brackenridge, and
Charles Brockden Brown in the post-Revolutionary period and on
Fenimore Cooper, Emerson, and Melville in the antebellum period,
Patterson provides a series of brilliant readings of major texts in
order to describe how American writers have conflated political and
literary concerns as a means to their own social authority.
Originally published in 1988.
The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand
technology to again make available previously out-of-print books
from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press.
These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these
important books while presenting them in durable paperback
editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly
increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the
thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since
its founding in 1905.
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