The impetus for literary creation has often been explained as an attempt to transcend the mortality of the human condition through a work addressed to future generations. Failing to obtain literal immortality, or to turn their hope toward the spiritual immortality promised by religious systems, literary creators seek a symbolic form of perpetuity granted to the intellectual side of their person in the memory of those not yet born while they write. In this book, Benjamin Hoffmann illuminates the paradoxes inherent in the search for symbolic immortality, arguing that the time has come to find a new answer to a perennial question: Why do people write? Exploring the fields of digital humanities and book history, Hoffmann describes posterity as a network of interconnected memories that constantly evolves by reserving a variable and continuously renegotiated place for works and authors of the past. In other words, the perpetual safeguarding of texts is delegated to a collectivity that is nonexistent at the moment when a writer addresses it, one whose nature is characterized by impermanence and instability. Focusing on key works by Denis Diderot, Etienne-Maurice Falconet, Giacomo Casanova, Francois-Rene de Chateaubriand, and Jean-Paul Sartre, Hoffmann considers the authors' representations of posterity, the representation of authors by posterity, and how to register and preserve works in the network of memories. In doing so, Hoffmann reveals the three great paradoxes in the quest for symbolic immortality: the paradoxes of belief, of identity, and of mediation. Theoretically sophisticated and convincingly argued, this book contends that there is only one truly serious literary problem: the transmission of texts to posterity. It will appeal to specialists in literature, in particular eighteenth-century French literature, as well as scholars and students of philosophy and book history.

Benjamin Hoffmann’s Posthumous America examines the literary idealization of a lost American past in the works of French writers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. For writers such as John Hector St. John de Crèvecœur and Claude-François de Lezay-Marnésia, America was never more potent as a driving ideal than in its loss. Examining the paradoxical American paradise depicted in Crèvecœur’s Lettres d’un cultivateur américain (1784); the “uchronotopia�—the imaginary perfect society set in America and based on what France might have become without the Revolution—of Lezay-Marnésia’s Lettres écrites des rives de l’Ohio (1792); and the political and nationalistic motivations behind François-René Chateaubriand’s idealization of America in Voyage en Amérique (1827) and Mémoires d’outre-tombe (1850), Hoffmann shows how the authors’ liberties with the truth helped create the idealized and nostalgic representation of America that dominated the collective European consciousness of their times. From a historical perspective, Posthumous America works to determine when exactly these writers stopped transcribing what they actually observed in America and started giving imaginary accounts of their experiences. A vital contribution to transatlantic studies, this detailed exploration of French perspectives on the colonial era, the War of Independence, and the birth of the American Republic sheds new light on the French fascination with America. Posthumous America will be invaluable for historians, political scientists, and specialists of literature whose scholarship looks at America through European eyes.

The impetus for literary creation has often been explained as an attempt to transcend the mortality of the human condition through a work addressed to future generations. Failing to obtain literal immortality, or to turn their hope toward the spiritual immortality promised by religious systems, literary creators seek a symbolic form of perpetuity granted to the intellectual side of their person in the memory of those not yet born while they write. In this book, Benjamin Hoffmann illuminates the paradoxes inherent in the search for symbolic immortality, arguing that the time has come to find a new answer to a perennial question: Why do people write? Exploring the fields of digital humanities and book history, Hoffmann describes posterity as a network of interconnected memories that constantly evolves by reserving a variable and continuously renegotiated place for works and authors of the past. In other words, the perpetual safeguarding of texts is delegated to a collectivity that is nonexistent at the moment when a writer addresses it, one whose nature is characterized by impermanence and instability. Focusing on key works by Denis Diderot, Etienne-Maurice Falconet, Giacomo Casanova, Francois-Rene de Chateaubriand, and Jean-Paul Sartre, Hoffmann considers the authors' representations of posterity, the representation of authors by posterity, and how to register and preserve works in the network of memories. In doing so, Hoffmann reveals the three great paradoxes in the quest for symbolic immortality: the paradoxes of belief, of identity, and of mediation. Theoretically sophisticated and convincingly argued, this book contends that there is only one truly serious literary problem: the transmission of texts to posterity. It will appeal to specialists in literature, in particular eighteenth-century French literature, as well as scholars and students of philosophy and book history.

Benjamin Hoffmann's Posthumous America examines the literary idealization of a lost American past in the works of French writers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. For writers such as John Hector St. John de Crevecoeur and Claude-Francois de Lezay-Marnesia, America was never more potent as a driving ideal than in its loss. Examining the paradoxical American paradise depicted in Crevecoeur's Lettres d'un cultivateur americain (1784); the "uchronotopia"-the imaginary perfect society set in America and based on what France might have become without the Revolution-of Lezay-Marnesia's Lettres ecrites des rives de l'Ohio (1792); and the political and nationalistic motivations behind Francois-Rene Chateaubriand's idealization of America in Voyage en Amerique (1827) and Memoires d'outre-tombe (1850), Hoffmann shows how the authors' liberties with the truth helped create the idealized and nostalgic representation of America that dominated the collective European consciousness of their times. From a historical perspective, Posthumous America works to determine when exactly these writers stopped transcribing what they actually observed in America and started giving imaginary accounts of their experiences. A vital contribution to transatlantic studies, this detailed exploration of French perspectives on the colonial era, the War of Independence, and the birth of the American Republic sheds new light on the French fascination with America. Posthumous America will be invaluable for historians, political scientists, and specialists of literature whose scholarship looks at America through European eyes.

First published in French in 1792, Letters Written from the Banks of the Ohio tells the fascinating story of French aristocrat Claude-François de Lezay-Marnésia and the utopia he attempted to create in what is now Ohio. Looking to build a perfect society based on what France might have become without the Revolution, Lezay-Marnésia bought more than twenty thousand acres of land along the banks of the Ohio River from the Scioto Company, which promised French aristocrats a fertile, conflict-free refuge. But hostilities between the U.S. Army and the Native American tribes who still lived on the land prevented the marquis from taking possession. Ruined and on the verge of madness, Lezay-Marnésia returned to France just as the Revolution was taking a more radical turn. He barely escaped the guillotine before dying a few years later in poverty and desperation. This edition of the Letters, introduced and edited by Benjamin Hoffmann and superbly translated by Alan J. Singerman, presents the work for the first time since the beginning of the nineteenth century—and the first time ever in English. The volume features a rich collection of supplementary documents, including texts by Lezay-Marnésia’s son, Albert de Lezay-Marnésia, and the American novelist Hugh Henry Brackenridge. This fresh perspective on the young United States as it was represented in French literature casts new light on a captivating and tumultuous period in the history of two nations.