Paul Downes combines literary criticism and political history in
order to explore responses to the rejection of monarchism in the
American revolutionary era. Downes' analysis considers the
Declaration of Independence, Franklin's autobiography, Crevecoeur's
Letters from an American Farmer and the works of America's first
significant literary figures including Charles Brockden Brown,
Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper. He claims that the
post-revolutionary American state and the new democratic citizen
inherited some of the complex features of absolute monarchy, even
as they were strenuously trying to assert their difference from it.
In chapters that consider the revolution's mock execution of George
III, the Elizabethan notion of the 'king's two bodies' and the
political significance of the secret ballot, Downes points to the
traces of monarchical political structures within the practices and
discourses of early American democracy. This is an ambitious study
of an important theme in early American culture and society.
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