Notes

N.B.: A bracketed author’s name, in the text or in the endnotes, indicates that I have not been able to authenticate the identity of the author. Also, since orthography, punctuation, and even wording can change with the publisher, I have tried to retain the idiosyncratic features of the individual edition from which I quote. However, this has proven to be difficult in cases where the type is unclear and where the range of typefaces is too various to be reproduced here (see page 79). Even on a textual level, interpretation—not simple transcription—is sometimes required.

Introduction to the Expanded Edition

1. At least since Lillie Deming Loshe’s The Early American Novel, 1789–1830 (1907; repr., New York: Frederick Ungar, 1966), scholars have written about early American fiction. Revolution and the Word pays homage to its many important predecessors, including Herbert Ross Brown, The Sentimental Novel in America, 1789–1860 (New York: Pageant, 1940); Helen Papashvily, All the Happy Endings; A Study of the Domestic Novel in America, the Women Who Wrote It, the Women Who Read It in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Harper, 1956); and Henri Petter, The Early American Novel (Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press, 1971). However, it was not until Revolution and the Word and the Early American Women Writers series at Oxford University Press that early fiction became “canonical.” Since their appearance in paperback classroom editions, Susanna Rowson’s Charlotte Temple and Hannah Webster Foster’s The Coquette have almost become “best-sellers” once again. Several subsequent new editions of both novels have been reprinted by academic and commercial presses.

2. Two influential discussions of the interrelationships of cultural power, value, and standards of judgment are Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1984), and Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Contingencies of Value (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1988).

3. Bernard Bailyn, To Begin the World Anew: The Genius and Ambiguities of the American Founders (New York: Knopf, 2003), pp. 7–8.

4. For a fascinating discussion of plagiarism in early America (including the accusations leveled against Thomas Jefferson), see Jay Fliegelman, Declaring Independence: Jefferson, National Language, and the Culture of Performance (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1993).

5. Grant Farred, What’s My Name? Black Vernacular Intellectuals (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2003).

6. Jan Lewis has recently found evidence that women were brought (briefly) into the discussion of the Constitution during the heated debates on slavery. See Lewis, “ ‘of every age sex & condition’ ”: The Representation of Women in the Constitution,” Journal of the Early Republic, 15 (1995), 359–97. See also Linda K. Kerber, No Constitutional Right to Be Ladies: Women and the Obligations of Citizenship (New York: Hill & Wang, 1998).

7. In 1843, more than fifty years later, and after the death of all those who participated in the Constitutional Convention, Congress voted to publish Madison’s notes. Robert A. Ferguson, Law and Letters in American Culture (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1984).

8. Leonard L. Richards, Shays’s Rebellion: The American Revolution’s Final Battle (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), p. 4. For a fascinating discussion of the kinds of arguments made against independence on the ground that it would encourage rule of the mob, see Woody Holton, Forced Founders: Indians, Debtors, Slaves, and the Making of the American Revolution in Virginia (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1999).

9. A fine collection of essays on this subject is Seyla Benhabib, ed., Democracy and Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1996).

10. Robert Ferguson has called the American Revolution “the greatest literary achievement of eighteenth-century America,” in “Finding the Revolution,” The Cambridge History of American Literature, vol. 1, 1590–1820, Sacvan Bercovitch, general ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1994), p. 347.

11. The classic text in the social history of the period is Gordon S. Wood’s magisterial The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787 (New York: Norton, 1969). While I am entirely convinced by Wood’s evidence of widespread dissension in this period, I disagree with Wood on the value of “unity” as a necessary (and even inevitable) reconfiguration of postrevolutionary energies.

12. Dana D. Nelson, “Conster/Nation,” in The Futures of American Studies, ed. Donald E. Pease and Robyn Wiegman (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 2002), p. 575. For an incisive analysis of unity as an antidemocratic norm, see also Nelson, National Manhood: Capitalist Citizenship and the Imagined Fraternity of White Men (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1998).

13. Sheldon S. Wolin, The Presence of the Past: Essays on the State and the Constitution (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1989).

14. Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1984), p. 65.

15. William Hill Brown, The Power of Sympathy, ed. William S. Kable (Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press, 1969), p. 4.

16. Grantland S. Rice, in The Transformation of Authorship in America (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1997), pp. 147–72, provides an astute reading of the novel as a kind of “coquette” that whispers promises but delivers only flirtation itself. He also surveys critics of early American fiction—including Michael Gilmore, Michael Warner, Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, and Steven Watts—who differently define or defend republicanism or liberalism (pp. 153–56).

17. For a productive account of class that raises methodological challenges to traditional labor history, see Nicholas K. Bromell, By the Sweat of the Brow: Literature and Labor in Antebellum America (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1993). For a discussion of labor history in relation to cultural history and historical materialism, see Lenard R. Berlanstein, ed., Rethinking Labor History: Essays on Discourse and Class Analysis (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1993). See also Joan W. Scott, “On Language, Gender, and Working-Class History,” International Labor and Working-Class History, 31 (1986), 1–13; and Christine Stansell, “A Response to Joan Scott,” International Labor and Working-Class History, 31 (1987), 24–29.

18. One of the finest articles to address the issue of affect is Lauren Berlant’s “Poor Eliza,” first published in American Literature, 70 (September 1998), 635–68. See also Elizabeth Barnes, States of Sympathy: Seduction and Democracy in the American Novel (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1997); Wendy Brown, States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1995); Peter Coviello, “Agonizing Affection: Affect and Nation in Early America,” Early American Literature, 37 (2002), 439–68; and Glenn Hendler, Public Sentiments: Structures of Feeling in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2001).

19. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “The Problem of Cultural Self-Representation,” in The Post-Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues, ed. Sarah Harasym (New York: Routledge, 1990), pp. 50–55. See also Perry Anderson, In the Tracks of Historical Materialism (London: Verso, 1983).

20. Benedict Anderson raises similar issues in Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983; rev. ed. 1991).

21. Elizabeth McHenry, Forgotten Readers: Recovering the Lost History of African American Literary Societies (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 2002). See also Carla Peterson, Doers of the Word: African-American Women Speakers and Writers in the North (1830–1880) (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1995).

22. Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon, 1984), and The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991), and Michael Warner, The Republic of Letters (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1990).

23. Antonio Negri, Insurgencies: Constituent Power and the Modern State, trans. Maurizia Boscagli (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1999). Much light can be shed upon the U.S. Constitution by comparing it to other constitutions by new republics. See Martin Van Gelderen and Quentin Skinner, eds., Republicanism: A Shared European Heritage (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2002), vols. 1 and 2; H. Jefferson Powell, The Moral Tradition of American Constitutionalism (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1993); and Cass R. Sunstein, Designing Democracy: What Constitutions Do (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2001). See also Vine DeLoria, Jr., and David E. Wilkins, Tribes, Treaties, and Constitutional Tribulations (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1999).

24. There is a rich literature on the social history of the early American crowd. Among recent examples is David Waldsreicher, In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes: The Making of American Nationalism, 1776–1820 (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1997). Sandra M. Gustafson, in Eloquence Is Power: Oratory and Performance in Early America (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2000), makes a similar argument to the one I am making about the novel in discussing the continuum of speech in early America, including discussions of not only the pulpit but of women’s speech, Native American speech, revolutionary speech, and postrevolutionary “representative” speech.

25. Lawrence Buell, “American Literary Emergence as a Postcolonial Phenomenon,” American Literary History, 4 (Autumn 1992), 411, 412.

26. The Cultures of U.S. Imperialism (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1993); Journal of American History, 88 (2001), 829–65. A pivotal moment in the study of colonialism in regard to American history was Gary Nash’s presidential address to the Organization of American Historians in 1995, “The Hidden History of Mestizo America.”

27. Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event (New York: Cassell, 1999). See also Michael Warner, “What’s Colonial about Colonial America?” in Possible Pasts: Becoming Colonial in Early America, ed. Robert Blair St. George (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 2000).

28. Todorov, The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1987); Spivak, In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (London: Methuen, 1987), and “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Chicago: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1988), 271–313.

29. Nelson, in American Literary History, 15 (Summer 2003), 367–94. Another excellent assessment of work on this topic is Ania Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialism (New York: Routledge, 1998). See also Ralph Bauer, “Creole Identities in Colonial Space: The Narratives of Mary White Rowlandson and Francisco Núñez de Pineda y Bascuñán,” American Literature, 69 (1997), 665–95; Jorge Canizares-Esguerra, How to Write the History of the New World: History, Epistemologies, and Identities in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 2001); Michael Denning, “Globalization in Cultural Studies: Process and Epoch,” European Journal of Cultural Studies, 4 (2001), 351–64; John Docker, 1492: The Poetics of Diaspora (New York: Continuum, 2001); Roland Greene, Unrequited Conquests: Love and Empire in the Colonial Americas (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1999); Annette Kolodny, “Letting Go Our Grand Obsessions: Notes toward a New Literary History of the American Frontiers,” American Literature, 64 (1992), 1–18; Rob Kroes, Them and Us: Questions of Citizenship in a Globalizing World (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 2000); Mary N. Layoun, Wedded to the Land? Gender; Boundaries, and Nationalism in Crisis (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 2001); George Lipsitz, American Studies in a Moment of Danger (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2001); Jose Rabasa, Writing Violence on the Northern Frontier: The Historiography of Sixteenth-Century New Mexico and Florida and the Legacy of Conquest (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 2000); Daniel K. Richter, Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 2002); John Carlos Rowe, ed., Post-Nationalist American Studies (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 2000); Patricia Seed, American Pentimento: The Invention of Indians and the Pursuit of Riches (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2001); William C. Spengemann, “What Is American Literature?” Centennial Review, 22 (1978), 119–38.

30. See Immanuel Wallerstein, Capitalist World Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1979); Gayatri Spivak, The Spivak Reader, ed. Gayatri Spivak, Donna Landry, and Gerald MacLean (New York: Routledge, 1995), and A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1999); Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994); Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2001), and Habitations of Modernity: Essays in the Wake of Subaltern Studies (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2002); Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1996); Walter Mignolo, “The Many Faces of Cosmo-polis: Border Thinking and Critical Cosmopolitanism,” Public Culture, 12 (Fall 2000), 721–48; Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1996).

31. This address was published as “Loose Change,” American Quarterly, 46 (1994), 123–38. For examples of “inter-American” studies, see Maria de Guzman, “Consolidating Anglo-American Imperial Identity around the Spanish-American War (1898),” in Race and the Invention of Modern American Nationalism (New York: Garland, 1999), and David Kazanjian, “Charles Brockden Brown’s Biloquil Nation: National Culture and White Settler Colonialism in Memoirs of Car win the Biloquist,” American Literature, 73 (2001), 459–96.

32. A number of recent works address early American imperialism: Greene, Unrequited Conquests; Nabil Matar, Turks, Moors, and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1999); John Carlos Rowe, in Literary Culture and U.S. Imperialism: From the Revolution to World War II (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2000). See also the superb collection edited by Martin Daunton and Rick Halpern, Empire and Others: British Encounters with Indigenous Peoples, 1600–1850 (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1999). See also Vicente L. Rafael, Contracting Colonialism: Translation and Christian Conversion in Tagalog Society under Early Spanish Rule (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1993), and Priscilla Wald, Constituting Americans: Cultural Anxiety and Narrative Form (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1995).

33. Leonard Levy, Legacy of Suppression: Freedom of Speech and Press in Early American History (Cambridge: Belknap, 1960); David McCullough, John Adams (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2001); John Chester Miller, Crisis in Freedom: The Alien and Sedition Acts (Boston: Little, Brown, 1951; repr. 1964); James Morton Smith, Freedom’s Fetters: The Alien and Sedition Laws and American Civil Liberties (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1956).

34. Perry Miller, The New England Mind: From Colony to Province (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1956); Sacvan Bercovitch, The Puritan Origins of the American Self (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1975), The American Jeremiad (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1978), and The Rites of Assent: Transformations in the Symbolic Construction of America (New York: Routledge, 1993).

35. Christopher Newfield, The Emerson Effect: Individualism and Submission in America (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1996). I fully concur with Newfield’s argument about compromise and moderation, but would argue that Emerson articulates impulses in American culture that go back to its founding moments.

36. For a range of studies on democracy and disagreement, see James Bohman and William Rehg, eds., Deliberative Democracy: Essays on Reason and Politics (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997); Amy Gutmann, ed., Democracy and Disagreement (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1996); Stephen MacEdo, Deliberative Politics: Essays on Democracy and Disagreement (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1999); and Iris Marion Young, Inclusion and Democracy (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2000).

37. Jacques Rancière, Dis-agreement: Politics and Philosophy, trans. Julie Rose (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1999), pp. 115–16.

38. Homi K. Bhabha, ed., Nation and Narration (New York: Routledge, 1990), and The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994).

39. The eminent Constitutional legal historian Robert Alan Dahl has recently argued that the Constitution fails as a truly democratic instrument. He also corrects the exaggerated notion that it has been widely admired and emulated by those in other democracies. See How Democratic Is the American Constitution? (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 2002).

40. Roberto Gonzalez Echevarría, Myth and Archive: A Theory of Latin American Narrative (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1990).

41. Jean Franco, An Introduction to Spanish–American Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1969), pp. 34–36.

42. Hugh Henry Brackenridge, Modern Chivalry, ed. Claude M. Newlin (New York: American Book Co., 1937), p. 507; italics in the original.

43. Doris Sommer, Foundational Fictions: The National Romances of Latin America (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1993).

44. For an interesting discussion of Sampson, see Mechal Sobel, Teach Me Dreams: The Search for Self in the Revolutionary Era (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2000). See also Alfred F. Young, “The Women of Boston: ‘Persons of Consequence’ in the Making of the American Revolution, 1765–1776,” in Women and Politics in the Age of the Democratic Revolution (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1993).

45. For a survey of the rich variety of approaches to inter-American studies, see The Futures of American Studies.

46. Quoted in McCullough, John Adams, p. 67.

47. For a variety of arguments and approaches to postcolonial literary studies, especially as a corrective to the Eurocentric traditions of “comparative literature,” see the January 2003 issue (vol. 118) of PMLA, “America: The Idea, the Literature,” coordinated by Djelal Kadir. See also Srinivas Aravamudan, Tropicopolitans: Colonialism and Agency, 1688–1804 (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1999).

48. For a penetrating early critique of the function of the ideological underpinnings of New Historicism, see Marguerite Walker, “Academic Tootsie: The Denial of Difference and the Difference It Makes,” Diacritics, 17 (Spring 1987), 2–20. A collection sympathetic to New Historicism from the same era is H. Aram Veeser, The New Historicism (New York: Routledge, 1989).

49. For an interesting comparison to the U.S. situation, see Joan B. Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1988).

50. See Elizabeth Barnes, States of Sympathy: Seduction and Democracy in the American Novel (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1997); Gillian Brown, Domestic Individualism: Imagining Self in Nineteenth-Century America (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1990), and The Consent of the Governed: The Lockean Legacy in Early American Culture (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 2001); and Julia Stern, The Plight of Feeling: Sympathy and Dissent in the Early American Novel (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1997). For a thoughtful review essay, see Wai-Chee Dimock, “Feminism, New Historicism, and the Reader,” American Literature, 63 (December 1991), 601–22. Dimock is one of the few theorists who differentiates the approaches of feminist literary scholars of the 1980s and 1990s. See also Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1987), which focuses primarily on British fiction.

51. Winfried Fluck elaborates upon the so-called Davidson school in “From Aesthetics to Political Criticism: Theories of the Early American Novel,” in Early America Re-Explored: New Readings in Colonial, Early National, and Antebellum Culture, ed. Klaus H. Schmidt and Fritz Fleischmann (New York: P. Lang, 2000), pp. 225–68.

52. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon, 1972); Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977 (New York: Pantheon, 1980).

53. Lora Romero, Home Fronts: Domesticity and Its Critics in the Antebellum United States (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1997), pp. 4–5.

54. For a wide range of essays embracing the position of “participant critic,” see Henry Jenkins, Tara McPherson, and Jane Shattuc, eds., Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 2002).

55. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading, Reparative Reading,” in Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 2003), pp. 123–51. An earlier version of this essay was part of the introduction to Sedgwick’s Novel Gazing: Queer Readings in Fiction (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1997).

56. Walter Benn Michaels, Our America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1995).

57. These comments on the affective logic of opposition were arrived at in dialogue with two readers of this introduction, Alice Kaplan and Monique Allewaert.

58. For an overtly “alternative” history of America, see Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States, 1492–Present (New York: HarperCollins, 1999, new ed.).

59. For an excellent summary of Shays’s rebellion, see www.calliope.org/shays. The site offers teachers of American history lively audio-visual formats for studying at key historical events. See also Davd P. Szatmary, The Making of An Agrarian Insurrection (Amherst: Univ. of Massachusetts Press, 1980), and Richards, Shays’s Rebellion.

60. Richards, Shays’s Rebellion, p. 164.

61. These issues are addressed forcefully in Linda K. Kerber, “Separate Spheres, Female Worlds, Woman’s Place: The Rhetoric of Women’s History,” first published in Journal of American History, 75 (June 1988), 9–39, and reprinted in No More Separate Spheres! A Next Wave American Studies Reader, ed. Cathy N. Davidson and Jessamyn Hatcher (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 2002). See also my earlier special issue of American Literature, 70 (September 1998), with the same title, “No More Separate Spheres!” For another collection that builds on this work, see Monika Elbert, ed., Separate Spheres No More: Gender Convergence in American Literature, 1830–1930 (Tuscaloosa: Univ. of Alabama Press, 2000).

62. For other texts that complicate the notion of the separate spheres, see Julie Ellison, Cato’s Tears and the Making of Anglo-American Emotion (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1999); Ruth Frankenberg, White Women, Race Matters (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1993); Kathleen Anne McHugh, American Domesticity: From How-to Manual to Hollywood Melodrama (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1999); Dana D. Nelson, “ ‘No Cold or Empty Heart’: Polygenesis, Scientific Professionalization, and the Unfinished Business of Male Sentimentalism,” differences, 11 (1999), 29–56; Shirley Samuels, Romances of the Republic: Women, the Family, and Violence in the Literature of the Early American Nation (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1996), and the essays in Samuels’s collection The Culture of Sentiment: Race, Gender, and Sentimentality in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1992).

63. This is discussed at length in chapter 6.

64. Ranjana Khanna, Dark Continents: Psychoanalysis and Colonialism (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 2003).

65. Special thanks to Eden Osucha for helping me assemble this genealogy of identity politics. For a brilliant exegesis of these issues, see Lowe, Immigrant Acts. How multiple conditions of identity apply can be seen in the fact that while one was defined as a slave if one’s mother was a slave, the 1790 immigration act states that “the right of citizenship shall not descend to persons whose fathers have never been resident in the United States” (pp. 6–22).

66. Kaplan, “Manifest Domesticity,” pp. 183–208; and You-Me Park and Gayle Wald, “Native Daughters in the Promised Land: Gender, Race, and the Question of Separate Spheres,” pp. 263–90, both in No More Separate Spheres!

67. Blair St. George, Possible Pasts, p. 10.

68. Christopher Castiglia, Bound and Determined: Captivity, Culture-Crossing, and White Womanhood from Mary Rolwandson to Patty Hearst (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press), 1996. See also Michelle Burnham, Captivity and Sentiment: Cultural Exchange in American Literature, 1682–1861 (Hanover: Univ. Press of New England, 1997); Gary L. Ebersole, Captured by Texts: Puritan to Post-Modern Images of Indian Captivity (Charlottesville: Univ. Press of Virginia, 1995); and Michael Moon, “A Long Foreground: Re-Materializing the History of Native American Relations to Mass Culture,” in Materializing Democracy, ed. Russ Castronovo and Dana Nelson (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 2002), pp. 267–93.

69. Diana Fuss, Identification Papers (New York: Routledge, 1995), and Essentially Speaking (New York: Routledge, 1989). The oft-cited, if historically problematic, article on this topic is Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, “Female World of Love and Ritual,” Signs, ι (1975), later included in Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (New York: Knopf, 1985).

70. Judith Halberstam, Female Masculinity (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1998). See also Alfred F. Young, Masquerade: The Life and Times of Deborah Sampson, Continental Soldier (New York: Knopf, 2004).

71. Judith Butler, preface (1990) to Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1999), xxxii. See also Butler’s Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993), and Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (New York: Routledge, 1997). For an excellent historicization of sexuality, see also Carla Freccero and Louise Fradenburg, eds., Premodern Sexualities (New York: Routledge, 1996), and Jonathan Goldberg, Queering the Renaissance (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1994). For a transnational account of sexuality, see George Chancey and Beth Povenelli’s special issue of GLQ, 5 (1999) “Thinking Sexuality Transnationally.” And, of course, the monumental theorization of sexuality is Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality, vol. 1, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1990).

72. See, for example, Bruce Burgett, Sentimental Bodies: Sex, Gender, and Citizenship in the Early Republic (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1998), and Burgett’s “Between Speculation and Population: The Problem of ‘Sex’ in Our Long Eighteenth Century,” Early American Literature, 36 (2002), 119–53; and Caleb Crain, American Sympathy: Men, Friendship, and Literature in the New Nation (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 2001). See also Lisa Duggan, “Queering the State,” Social Text, 39 (Summer 1994), 1–14; George Haggerty, Men in Love: Masculinity and Sexuality in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1999); David Halperin, One Hundred Years of Homosexuality (New York: Routledge, 1990); Michael Warner, “Irving’s Posterity,” ELH, 67 (2000), 773–99, and The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life (New York: Free Press, 1999). See also the essays in Mary Chapman and Glenn Hendler, Sentimental Men: Masculinity and the Politics of Affect in American Culture (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1999). For two recent historical assessments of early American masculinity in more traditional terms, see Joseph J. Ellis, Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation (New York: Knopf, 2001), and Joanne B. Freeman, Affairs of Honor: National Politics in the New Republic (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 2001).

73. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1985), theorizes the role of men and the role of women in homosocial situations of bonding.

74. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the “Racial” Self (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1987), and The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1989); Houston A. Baker, Jr., The Journey Back (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1984).

75. Hazel V. Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1987); Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (New York: Routledge, 1991); bell hooks, Feminist Theory: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black (Boston: South End, 1989); Gloria T. Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith, All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, but Some of Us Are Brave (Old Westbury: Feminist Press, 1982); Deborah E. McDowell and Arnold Rampersad, Slavery and the Literary Imagination, Selected Papers from the English Institute, 1987 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1989).

76. For an overview, see William L. Andrews, To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro-American Autobiography, 1760–1865 (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1986); Vincent Carretta and Philip Gould, eds., Genius in Bondage: Literature of the Early Black Atlantic (Lexington: Univ. Press of Kentucky, 2001); Frank Shuffleton, A Mixed Race: Ethnicity in Early America (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1993); Eric J. Sundquist, To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1993); Ronald Takaki, Iron Cages: Race and Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Knopf, 1979); and Robert S. Levine, Martin Delany, Frederick Douglass, and the Politics of Representative Identity (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1997). See also Vincent Carretta, ed., Unchained Voices: An Anthology of Black Authors in the English-Speaking World of the Eighteenth Century (Lexington: Univ. Press of Kentucky, 1996).

77. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1993); Wahneema Lubiano, ed., The House That Race Built: Black Americans, U.S. Terrain (New York: Pantheon, 1997); and Robin D. G. Kelley, Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class (New York: Free Press, 1996), and Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (Boston: Beacon, 2002).

78. See Jean Neinkamp and Andrea Collins, introduction to Tabitha Gilman Tenney, Female Quixotism (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1992), for a discussion of race and racism in the novel.

79. For fascinating discussions of how and why Native Americans “haunt” the American landscape, see Rénee Bergland, The National Uncanny: Indian Ghosts and American Subjects (Hanover: Univ. Press of New England, 2000), and Jill Lepore, The Name of War: King Phillip’s War and the Origins of American Identity (New York: Random House, 1999). See also Alan Gallay, The Indian Slave Trade: The Rise of the English Empire in the American South, 1680–1717 (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 2002); Hilary E. Wyss, Writing Indians: Literacy, Christianity, and Native Community in Early America (Amherst: Univ. of Massachusetts Press, 2000); and Cheryl Walker, Indian Nation: Native American Literature and Nineteenth-Century Nationalisms (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1999).

80. Anibal Quijano and Immanuel Waller stein, “Americanicity as a Concept, or the Americas in the Modern World-System,” International Social Science Journal, 134 (November 1992), 551. See also Barnor Hesse, “Forgotten Like a Bad Dream: Atlantic Slavery and the Ethics of Postcolonial Memory,” in Relocating Postcolonialism, ed. David Theo Goldberg and Ato Quayson (Maiden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2000), pp. 143–73. For two important texts on the relationship between colonialism and slavery, see also Srinivas Aravamudan, Tropicopolitans: Colonialism and Agency, 1688–1804 (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1999); Joan Dayan, Haiti, History, and the Gods (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1998). For an excellent historical survey, see Michael L. Conniff and Thomas J. Davis, Africans in the Americas: A History of the Black Diaspora (New York: St. Martin’s, 1994).

81. Different analyses of racism and imperialism are discussed by Ann Stoler in “Tense and Tender Ties: Intimacies of Empire in North American History and (Post) Colonial Studies,” Journal of American History, 88 (2001), 829–65. See also Russ Castronovo, Fathering the Nation: American Genealogies of Slavery and Freedom (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1995); Eric Cheyfitz, The Poetics of Imperialism: Translation and Colonialization from the Tempest to Tarzan (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror; Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1998); and Amy Kaplan, The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 2002). For a survey of historical writing, see Ian Tyrrell, “Making Nations/Making States: Historians in the Context of Empire,” Journal of American History, 86 (December 1999), 1015–44.

82. An excellent compendium of whiteness studies is Mike Hill, ed., Whiteness: A Critical Reader (New York: New York Univ. Press, 1997). See Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1995); David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (New York: Verso, 1999); and Robyn Wiegman, American Anatomies: Theorizing Race and Gender (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1995).

83. For a survey of approaches, see Carolyn Sorisio, Fleshing out America: Race, Gender; and the Politics of the Body in American Literature, 1833–1879 (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 2002), and Jared Gardner, Master Plots: Race and the Founding of an American Literature, 1787–1845 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1998).

84. Lee D. Baker, From Savage to Negro: Anthropology and the Construction of Race, 1896–1954 (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1998); and Roxann Wheeler, The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in Eighteenth-Century British Culture (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2000).

85. See Catherine La Courreye Blecki and Karin A. Wulf, Milcah Martha Moore’s Book: A Common Place Book from Revolutionary America (University Park: Pennsylvania State Univ. Press, 1997). See also Kevin J. Hayes, A Colonial Woman’s Bookshelf (Knoxville: Univ. of Tennessee Press, 1996); Carla Mulford, “Only for the Eye of a Friend”: The Poems of Annis Stockton Boudinot (Charlottesville: Univ. Press of Virginia, 1995); David S. Shields, “British-American Belles Lettres,” in The Cambridge History of American Literature, ed. Sacvan Bercovitch (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1994), 1:307–43; and Shields, Civil Tongues and Polite Letters in British America (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1997).

86. That experience became the basis for a monograph, originally delivered as the 1986 James Russell Wiggins Lecture in the History of the Book in American Culture at AAS, Ideology and Genre: The Rise of the Novel in America (Worcester, Mass.: American Antiquarian Society, 1987), and is reprinted in Reading in America: Literature and Social History, ed. Cathy N. Davidson (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1989).

87. A series of review essays in Journal of Modern History (JMH) recapitulate the ferment in European book history of the late 1980s. See Roger Chartier, “Text, Symbol, and Frenchness,” JMH, 57 (December 1985), 682–95; Robert Darnton, “The Symbolic Element in History,” JMH, 58 (March 1986), 218–34; Domick LaCapra, “Chartier, Darnton, and the Great Symbol Massacre,” JMH, 60 (March 1988), 95–112; and James Fernandez, “Historians Tell Tales: Of Cartesian Cats and Gallic Cockfights,” JMH, 60 (March 1988), 113–27.

88. Hugh Amory and David D. Hall, eds., A History of the Book in America, vol. ι, The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1999). In his review of this project (Early American Literature, 36 [2001], 132–36), Grantland S. Rice notes that similar multivolume national book history projects are under way in Wales, Scotland, Ireland, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and South Africa. Two of the most brilliant analyses of the last decade that chart the interrelationships among culture, reception, politics, and national identity are Purnima Mankekar, Screening Culture, Viewing Politics: An Ethnography of Television, Womanhood, and Nation in Postcolonial India (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1999); and Louise Meintjes, Sound of Africa! Making Music Zulu in a South African Studio (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 2003).

89. See Guglielmo Cavallo, Roger Chartier, and Lydia G. Cochrane, eds., A History of Reading in the West (Amherst: Univ. of Massachusetts Press, 1999). See also Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1998); and Kevin Sharpe, Reading Revolutions: The Politics of Reading in Early Modern England (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 2000).

90. For studies that emphasize oratory and rhetorical form, see Christopher Looby, Voicing America: Language, Literary Form, and the Origins of the United States (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1996), and Nancy Ruttenburg, Democratic Personality: Popular Voice and the Trial of American Authorship (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1998).

91. See Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early Modern Europe (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1979), and John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid, The Social Life of Information (Cambridge: Harvard Business School Press, 2002).

92. Thomas Kuhn, Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1964), and Imre Lakatos and Paul Feyerabend, For and Against Method, edited and with an introduction by Matteo Motterlini (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1999).

93. Karen W. Arenson, “Job Listings Decline Twenty Percent at Colleges: Drop Is the Largest in about a Decade,” New York Times, December 14, 2002, p. A13.

94. Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham made these comments in a presentation at the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute at Duke University on December 11, 2002.

95. For discussions of interdisciplinarity, see Julia Thompson Klein, Interdisciplinarity: History, Theory, and Practice (Detroit: Wayne State Univ. Press), and Crossing Boundaries: Knowledge, Disciplinarities, and Interdisciplinarities (Charlottesville: Univ. Press of Virginia, 1996), and W. T. Newell, ed., Interdisciplinarity: Essays from the Literature (New York: College Examination Board, 1998). See also Immanuel Wallerstein et al., Open the Social Sciences: Report of the Gulbenkian Commission on the Restructuring of the Social Sciences (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1996). See also my “What If Scholars in the Humanities Worked Together, in a Lab?” Chronicle of Higher Education, May 28, 1999, p. B4.

96. Lisa R. Lattuca, Creating Interdisciplinarity: Interdisciplinary Research and Teaching among College and University Faculty (Nashville: Vanderbilt Univ. Press, 2001), p. 1.

97. Kenneth Wissoker, in “Negotiating a Passage between Disciplinary Borders,” argues that what one calls interdisciplinarity is governed by particular field or disciplinary assumptions. See Chronicle of Higher Education, April 14, 2000, pp. 4–6. This essay was reprinted in an abridged form in the Social Science Research Council’s Items and Issues, 1 (2000), 1, 5–7, with responses by Lisa Anderson, Arjun Appadurai, Thomas Bender, Jeffrey Goldfarb, Michèle Lamont, and Joshua Guetzkow.

98. For the relationship of literacy and coloniality, see Walter D. Mignolo, The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, and Colonization (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1995).

99. Emory Elliott, in Aesthetics in a Multicultural Age (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2002), provides a retrospective assessment of the Culture Wars, looking back at the issues, assaying the results, and refuting some of the more divisive charges leveled in the Culture Wars.

100. Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987); E. D. Hirsch, Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987).

101. See Peter Pringle, “Victims of Slavery Find Their Voice: Nobel Winner Morrison’s ‘Shared Honour,’ ” Independent (London), October 10, 1993, p. 18; David Streitfeld, “Author Toni Morrison Wins Nobel Prize: First African American Laureate Says Honor Is ‘Shared among Us,’ ” Washington Post, October 8, 1993, p. Ai; and Daniel Johnson, “Of Prizes and Prejudice,” New York Times, October 8, 1993.

102. For an excellent analysis of many of these issues, see Christopher Newfield, “What Was Political Correctness? Race, the Right, and Managerial Democracy in the Humanities,” Critical Inquiry, 19 (1993), 308–36.

103. See Paul Lauter, Canons and Contexts (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1991).

104. Myra Jehlen and Michael Warner, eds., The English Literatures of America, 1500–1800 (New York: Routledge, 1997); Susan Castillo and Ivy Schweitzer, The Literatures of Colonial America (Maiden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2001). See also Carla Mulford, Angela Vietto, and Amy E. Winans, Early American Writings (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2001).

105. Sharon M. Harris, American Women Writers to 1800 (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1996); Ann Allen Shockley, Afro-American Women Writers, 1746–1993 (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1988).

106. Deirdre Mullane, Crossing the Danger Water: Three Hundred Years of African-American Writing (New York: Doubleday, 1993); John Edgar Wideman, My Soul Has Grown Deep: Classics of Early African-American Literature (New York: Ballantine, 2001); Moira Ferguson, Nine Black Women (New York: Routledge, 1998).

107. Alan R. Velie, American Indian Literature: An Anthology (1979; rev. ed., Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1991); Arnold Krupat, Native American Autobiography: An Anthology (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1994).

108. Emory Elliott, Columbia History of the American Novel (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1991).

109. Martin Bernai, Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization (New Brunswick: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1987); see also Jacques Berlinerblau, Heresy in the University: The Black Athena Controversy and the Responsibilities of American Intellectuals (New Brunswick: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1999), and Martin Bernai and David Chioni Moore, eds., Black Athena Writes Back: Martin Bernai Responds to His Critics (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 2001). The quotation about the process of intellectual change is from a talk Martin Bernai delivered at the John Hope Franklin Center for Interdisciplinary and International Studies at Duke University on February 5, 2003, entitled “The Afroasiatic Component in Ancient Greek Vocabulary.”

110. Nguyen Lien and Jonathan Auerbach, eds., Tiếp Cận Ðὐỏng Ðại Vặn Hoá Mỹ/Contemporary Approaches to American Culture (Hanoi: Nha Xuat Ban Van Hoa-Thong Tin, 2001).

111. Ibid., p. 24.

112. See Patricia M. Pelley, Postcolonial Vietnam: New Histories of the National Past (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 2002), esp. pp. 1–15 and 112–60. It will also be remembered that Ho Chi Minh was an admirer and serious student of the U.S. Declaration of Independence.

Chapter 1

1. Diary of Ethan Allen Greenwood, December 23, 1807, Manuscript Department, American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Mass. (Hereafter cited as AAS.) I am indebted to Georgia Brady Bumgardner for making available to me her paper “The Early Career of Ethan Allen Greenwood,” presented at the Dublin Seminar (Essex Institute, Salem, Mass.), June 1984.

2. The caveat is not to be applied to all studies of origins by any means. On the contrary, the present work is partly inspired by Ian Watt’s The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding (1957; repr., Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1967), still one of the finest studies of fiction by selected eighteenth-century British men. For a different account of the rise of the English novel, see Dale Spender, Mothers of the Novel (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986). Dale Spender generously shared many of her findings with me prior to their publication.

3. Robert Escarpit, Sociology of Literature, 2nd ed., trans. Ernest Pick (London: Frank Cass, 1971).

4. Robert Darnton, “What Is the History of Books?” in Books and Society in History, ed. Kenneth E. Carpenter (New York: R. R. Bowker, 1983), p. 3. This collection provides an excellent introduction to the discipline called, variously, l’histoire du livre, Geschichte des Buchwesens, or history of the book. See also the special issue of Eighteenth-Century Studies, 17 (Summer 1984), ed. Raymond Birn, and Birn’s “Livre et société After Ten Years: Formation of a Discipline,” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, 151 (1976), 287–312, as well as Darnton’s “Reading, Writing, and Publishing in Eighteenth-Century France: A Case Study in the Sociology of Literature,” Daedalus, 100 (Winter 1971), 214–56. For an excellent discussion of the relationship between l’histoire du livre and the study of mentalités, see Roger Chartier, “Intellectual History or Sociocultural History? The French Trajectories,” in Modern European Intellectual History: Reappraisals and New Perspectives, ed. Dominick La Capra and Steven L. Kaplan (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1982), pp. 13–46. These ideas are applied and then combined with reader-response criticism in Chartief’s “Du livre au lire,” in Pratiques de la lecture, ed. Roger Chartier (Paris: Editions Rivages, 1985), pp. 62–87.

5. Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin, L’Apparition du livre (Paris: Editions Albin Michel, 1958). The book was translated into English by David Gerard as The Coming of the Book (London: NLB, 1976). See also G. Thomas Tanselle, The History of Books as a Field of Study (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina, Rare Book Collection, 1981).

6. Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1980).

7. Susan R. Suleiman, “Introduction,” The Reader in the Text, ed. Susan R. Suleiman and Inge Crosman (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1980), p. 35. Suleiman paraphrases Hans Robert Jauss, esp. the essay “Literary History as a Challenge to Literary Theory,” repr. in Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, trans. Timothy Bahti (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1982), pp. 3–45. For another fine survey of reader-criticism, see Jane P. Tompkins, ed., Reader-Response Criticism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1980).

8. The term Rezeptionsästhetic is borrowed from Hans Robert Jauss and the other members of the Konstanz group, especially Wolfgang Iser and Jurij Striedter. See Jauss, Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, esp. pp. 23–24, 141–42, 171–72; and his Aesthetic Experience and Literary Hermeneutics, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1982); also Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1978); and Jurij Striedter, “Introduction to Felix Vodicka,” Die Struktur der literarischen Entwicklung (Munich: W. Fink, 1976). Another important contributor to response theory (and an important influence on Jauss) is Jan Mukarovsky in works such as Aesthetic Function, Norm, and Value as Social Facts, trans. Mark E. Suino (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1970), and Structure, Sign, and Function, trans, and ed. John Burbank and Peter Steiner (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1978). For an overview of Rezeptionsästhetik, see Richard E. Amacher and Victor Lange, eds., New Perspectives in German Literary Criticism: A Collection of Essays (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1979); D. W. Fokkema and Elrud Kunne-Bisch, Theories of Literature in the Twentieth Century: Structuralism, Marxism, Aesthetics of Reception, Semiotics (New York: St. Martin’s, 1977); Peter Uwe Hohendahl, “Introduction to Reception Aesthetics,” New German Critique, 10 (Winter 1977), 29–64; and “Interview: Hans Robert Jauss,” Diacritics, 5 (Spring 1975), 53–61.

9. I am here, as in the title of this chapter, playing off Roland Barthes’s famous distinction between a “work” (the end product of a system of artistic manufacture) and a “text” (a sign-system that is open-ended, created as much by the reader as the writer). Both aspects are crucial since works are not inspired but fabricated (like other forms of labor) within a specific economics, while texts are re-created (or even created) by every reader. See Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Hill & Wang, 1972), esp. his essay “Myth Today,” pp. 109–59.

10. One important methodology employed by historians of the book, inspired in part by François Furet and Jacques Ozouf, Reading and Writing: Literacy in France from Calvin to Jules Ferry (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1977), is to trace out the dissemination of books as indicated by purchase orders, account books, or lendinglibrary rosters.

11. This issue has been addressed most forcefully by Nina Baym, Novels, Readers, and Reviewers: Responses to Fiction in Antebellum America (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1984); William E. Cain, The Crisis in Criticism: Theory, Literature, and Reform in English Studies (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1984), esp. pp. 51–64; and Steven Mailloux, Interpretive Conventions: The Reader in the Study of American Fiction (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1982), esp. pp. 159–220.

12. Stanley Fish, Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1980), and “Literature in the Reader: Affective Stylistics,” New Literary History, 2 (Autumn 1970), 123–62.

13. Jonathan Culler, “Prolegomena to a Theory of Reading,” in Suleiman and Crosman, eds., The Reader in the Text, pp. 46–66; and The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, De construction (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1981).

14. Janice A. Radway, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1984).

15. A brief note on my sources is in order here. I began working with early American fiction in 1974; since then, I have tried to handle as many copies of early novels—as well as textbooks, primers, and readers, that I see as important to the development of the novel—as I could find in public and private libraries, historical societies, and bookstores. This study in no way pretends to be quantitative since I have exerted no statistical controls on my idiosyncratic perusal of almost twelve hundred copies of early American novels and approximately five thousand copies of textbooks. The only other study I know to make use of the impressionistic evidence of readers in extant copies of old books is Clifton Johnson’s delightful Old-Time Schools and School Books (1904; repr., New York: Macmillan, 1925), pp. 155–66. Others, however, have recently turned their attention to readers. For example, in the spring of 1984 Roger Stoddard of Houghton Library, Harvard University, mounted an exhibition “Marks in Books.” At Michigan State University, Jannette Fiore and Anne Tracy have begun to record and even track down readers who left inscriptions in the two thousand volumes of the Pedagogy Collection in the Russel B. Nye Popular Culture Collection. And at the AAS, the North American Imprints Program (NAIP), a computerized updating of Charles Evans’s American Bibliography (Chicago: Printed for the author by the Blakely Press, 1903–34), includes citations of inscribers’ names in AAS volumes. Special thanks to James F. Cuffe, Jr., Alan Degutis, and Richard Fyffe for making this important resource available to me before its official publication.

16. Isaiah Thomas called his edition (Worcester, Mass., 1785) of George Fisher’s book The Instructor; Or; American Young Man’s Best Companion, while the first American edition (Philadelphia: B. Franklin and D. Hall, 1748) was entitled The American Instructor; Or, Young Man’s Best Companion and repeated the lengthy subtitle of the original British edition: “Containing Spelling, Reading, Writing, and Arithmetick, in an Easier Way than any Yet Published, and How to Qpalify any Person for Business, without the Help of a Master.” Fisher’s was the most popular of the many self-improvement books that Franklin published. An 1812 edition of the book (Philadelphia: John Bioren) promised “Instructions for Reading, Writing, (including English Grammar,) Arithmetic, Merchants’ Accounts, Mensuration, Gauging according to the most modern and approved practice, and the Art of Dialling.” Some editions also contained recipes for everything from beer to herbal medicine, astrological tables, and other features appropriated from almanacs, again suggesting that the book could be used for widely diverse purposes by readers with different interests, skills, and educational levels.

17. As will be discussed in chapter 2, rarely were publishers able to find an adequate number of subscribers for novels, and only four early novels were published bound with subscription lists: the anonymous Humanity in Algiers; Or; The Story of Azem (Troy, N.Y.: R. Moffitt, 1801); Herman Mann, The Female Review; Or, Memoirs of an American Young Lady (Dedham, Mass.: Nathaniel & Benjamin Heaton, 1797); Samuel Reif, Infidelity, or the Victims of Sentiment (Philadelphia: W. W. Woodward, 1797); and Susanna Rowson, Trials of the Human Heart (Philadelphia: Printed for the author by Wrigley & Berriman, 1795).

18. This notice appeared in the Massachusetts Spy, or Worcester Gazette, March 2, 1803.

19. Mathew Carey, Account Books, Manuscript Department, AAS. Few women’s names are included in these account books or in those of Isaiah Thomas, which are also at the AAS. Similarly, of the 1,445 different names in account books from the Upper Valley district of rural Vermont (recorded between 1755 and 1851), William J. Gilmore has found only twenty-one female names. See his “Elementary Literacy on the Eve of the Industrial Revolution: Trends in Rural New England, 1760–1830,” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society, 92 (1982), 116. Mary Silliman, in her diary, notes that her husband, a state’s attorney, would not even discuss with her the mounting debts that directly affected her and their children. See Joy Day Buel and Richard Buel, Jr., The Way of Duty: A Woman and Her Family in Revolutionary America (New York: Norton, 1984), pp. 198–200.

20. The eight copies of The Instructor discussed on pp. 8–9 come, respectively, from the AAS (1800 edition), Newberry Library (1753), Newberry Library (1748), the Russel B. Nye Popular Culture Collection at Michigan State University (1812), the Leicester Public Library (1802), the AAS (1748), the AAS (1770), and Michigan State University (1812). It is virtually impossible to make a certain identification of inscribers based merely on a signature and a date. However, circumstantial evidence suggests that one recipient of the book, John Sharpies (b. 1749), was a respected Massachusetts farmer and a Quaker. The book was presented to him by his uncle, John Blakey (b. 1724), who, although apparently not a Qpaker, was known for presenting many books, primarily of a devotional nature, to various friends and relatives—a custom that would become widespread in the nineteenth century, fostered by a whole gift book industry. See Genealogy of the Sharpless [sic] Family, comp. Gilbert Cope (Philadelphia: for the family, under the auspices of the Bi-centennial Committee, 1887), pp. 179–81. My thanks to James F. Cuffe, Jr., for his help in identifying the inscriptions.

21. Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), p. 27.

22. One of the best studies of literary influence is still Paul M. Spurlin, Rousseau in America (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1940). See also “Readership in the American Enlightenment,” in Literature and History in the Age of Ideas, ed. C.G.S. Williams (Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press, 1975), pp. 358–73. An anecdote told by Bernard Bailyn at the Conference on Needs and Opportunities in the History of the Book (Worcester, Mass., November 3, 1984) demonstrates some of the pitfalls of “influence studies.” Bailyn told how, inspired by Furet and Ozouf, he determined to chart all the books actually borrowed by readers using a lending library in Hatboro, Penn., in the late eighteenth century, hoping, in the process, to document the impact of the great European intellectual tradition on American life. He gave up his study in disgust, however, when he discovered that the good readers of Hatboro borrowed not Cato’s Lives or Locke’s Education, but the History of Turkey (which included a chapter on harems), Nuptial Dialogues, and a host of what Bailyn refers to as “dirty novels.”

23. Robert B. Winans, “Bibliography and the Cultural Historian: Notes on the Eighteenth-Century Novel,” in Printing and Society in Early America, ed. William L. Joyce et al. (Worcester, Mass.: AAS, 1983), p. 178.

24. The best discussion of American book importation is Stephen Botein’s “The Anglo-American Book Trade Before 1776: Personnel and Strategies,” in Printing and Society in Early America, pp. 48–82. See also Giles Barber, “Books from the Old World and for the New: The British International Trade in Books in the Eighteenth Century,” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, 151 (1976), 185–224; John Clive and Bernard Bailyn, “England’s Cultural Provinces: Scotland and America,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 11 (October 1954), 200–213; and Margaret B. Tinkcom, “Urban Reflections in a Trans-Atlantic Mirror,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 100 (1976), 287–313. David Lundberg and Henry F. May, “The Enlightened Reader in America,” American Quarterly, 28 (Summer 1976), 262–71, and app., calculate the prevalence of certain preselected European titles in a sampling of early American libraries in order to hypothesize the relative influence of both classic and popular texts. William J. Gilmore-Lehne’s Reading Becomes a Necessity of Life: Material and Cultural Life in Rural New England, 1780–1835 (Knoxville: Univ. of Tennessee Press, 1989) promises to go a long way toward providing important new findings on what books actual readers actually read, at least in rural Vermont.

25. David D. Hall, “The Uses of Literacy in New England, 1600–1850,” in Printing and Society in Early America, pp. 2–47; John Seelye, Prophetic Waters: The River in Early American Life and Literature (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1977), pp. 3–5; and William C. Spengemann, “What Is American Literature?” Centennial Review, 22 (Spring 1978), 119–38; and Spengemann, “The Earliest American Novel: Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 39 (1984), 384–414.

26. George Raddin, An Early New York Library of Fiction, with a Checklist of the Fiction of H. Caritafs Circulating Library, No. 1, City Hotel, Broadway, New York, 1804 (New York: H. W. Wilson, 1940).

27. Virtually all previous studies of American fiction claim, either overtly or as an underlying assumption, the reliance of American fiction on British models. I also wish to acknowledge that this study simply would not have been written without its important predecessors: Herbert Ross Brown, The Sentimental Novel in America, 1789–1860 (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1940); Lillie Deming Loshe, The Early American Novel, 1789–1830 (1907; repr., New York: Frederick Ungar, 1966); Terence Martin, The Instructed Vision: Scottish Common Sense Philosophy and the Origins of American Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1961); and Henri Petter, The Early American Novel (Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press, 1971). For a comprehensive assessment of earlier criticism, see Patricia L. Parker, Early American Fiction: A Reference Guide (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1984).

28. How Americans made art from native materials is the predominant theme of Kenneth Silverman’s remarkable A Cultural History of the American Revolution (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1976).

29. The continuities of the culture of the 1790s and later American culture are explored by Emory Elliott, Revolutionary Writers: Literature and Authority in the New Republic, 1725–1810 (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1982).

30. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Harper & Row, 1976), pp. 3–17; Geertz, Interpretation of Cultures, p. 151; and Edward Said (esp. his distinction between beginnings and origins), Beginnings: Intention and Method (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1975), pp. xi–xiii, 3–26. It should also be added, however, that even retrospectively the historian, as Dominick La Capra has argued, does “not know how it all turned out.… In a word, historians are involved in the effort to understand both what something meant in its own time and what it may mean for us today.” See his Rethinking Intellectual History: Texts, Contexts, Language (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1983), p. 18.

31. The word genealogy is adapted from Michel Foucault, who prefers genealogy to history since the former remains conscious of what history leaves out, what is not known, what the methodology itself cannot comprehend, or what issues simply cannot be investigated given the historical record. The absences in the record (and they are inevitable) are thus as much a part of the genealogy as what is explicated. See Foucault’s “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1977), pp. 139–65, and for an excellent discussion on the subject, see Cain, Crisis in Criticism, pp. 256–77.

32. Mary Jacobus, “Is There a Woman in This Text?” New Literary History, 14 (Autumn 1982), 138.

33. Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1966), p. 116.

34. See Hayden White, Metahistory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1973), and his “The Narrativization of Real Events,” Critical Inquiry, 7 (Summer 1981), 793–98. See also Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1981). For a discussion of history as a “panoply of heterogeneous discursive practices,” see Michel Foucault, “History, Discourse, and Discontinuity,” trans. Anthony M. Nazzaro, Salmagundi, 20 (1972), 229–33.

35. E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Pantheon, 1964).

36. Perry Miller, The New England Mind: From Colony to Province (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1953).

37. For a concise and perceptive overview of the period, see William L. Hedges, “Charles Brockden Brown and the Culture of Contradictions,” Early American Literature, 9 (Fall 1974), 107–42.

38. Mikhail M. Bakhtin, “Epic and Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist and ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1981), esp. pp. 3–40.

39. So popular that it was read virtually into oblivion, the New England Primer was probably first published sometime between 1687 and 1690, although evidence of early editions remains scant and virtually no copies of the first editions of the book are extant. This quotation, however, appeared in most editions of the book, which was often retitled the New England Primer Improved in the later eighteenth century and which remained a steady seller until well into the nineteenth.

40. Lewis Hyde, The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property (New York: Vintage, 1979), p. xii. Special thanks to Margaret Atwood for suggesting I read this book in connection with my project.

41. For theoretical discussions of taste and the politics of privileging a culture’s “masterpieces,” see Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1984); and Jane Tompkins, Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790–1860 (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1985). For excellent analyses of the politics of canonization, see Annette Kolodny, “The Integrity of Memory: Creating a New Literary History of the United States,” American Literature, 57 (May 1985), 291–307; and Lillian S. Robinson, “Treason Our Text: Feminist Challenges to the Literary Canon,” in The New Feminist Criticism: Essays on Women, Literature, and Theory, ed. Elaine Showalter (New York: Pantheon, 1985), pp. 105–21.

Chapter 2

1. William Charvat, “Literary Economics and Literary History,” English Institute Essays, ed. Alan S. Downer (1949; repr., New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1965), pp. 74–75.

2. For a sampling of different opinions on the role of the printer in fostering republican ideology, see the essays in Bernard Bailyn and John B. Hench, eds., The Press and the American Revolution (Boston: Northeastern Univ. Press, 1981); and those in Donovan H. Bond, ed., Newsletters to Newspapers: Eighteenth-Century Journalism (Morgantown: West Virginia Univ. Press, 1977); as well as Stephen Botein, “ ‘Meer Mechanics’ and an Open Press: The Business and Political Strategies of Colonial American Printers,” Perspectives in American History, 9 (1975), 130–211; Clyde A. Duniway, The Development of Freedom of the Press in Massachusetts (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1906); Pauline Maier, From Resistance to Revolution: Colonial Radicals and the Development of American Opposition to Britain, 1756–1776 (New York: Knopf, 1972); Charles S. Olton, Artisans for Independence: Philadelphia Mechanics and the American Revolution (Syracuse: Syracuse Univ. Press, 1975); and Arthur M. Schlesinger, Prelude to Independence: The Newspaper War on Britain, 1764–1776 (New York: Knopf, 1958).

3. Rollo G. Silver, “The Book Trade and the Protective Tariff: 1800–1804,” Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 46 (1952), 33–44; and Ethelbert Stewart, A Documentary History of the Early Organizations of Printers (Indianapolis: International Typographical Union, 1907).

4. For an exhaustive (if controversial) study of the effects of print technology, see Elizabeth Eisenstein’s The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1979).

5. Martha Woodmansee, “The Genius and the Copyright: Economic and Legal Conditions of the Emergence of the ‘Author,’ ” Eighteenth–Century Studies, 17 (Summer 1984), 433. The first epigraph to this chapter also comes from this excellent study (p. 443).

6. Lawrence C. Wroth, in The Book in America, 2nd ed., ed. Hellmut Lehmann-Haupt, Lawrence C. Wroth, and Rollo G. Silver (New York: R. R. Bowker, 1951), posits between three and five hundred copies as “an average figure for editions of books and pamphlets of a literary or political character in the early and middle years of eighteenth century” (p. 40). Nor was this low volume unique to America. Richard D. Altick, The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public, 1800–1900 (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1957), notes that “single editions of the novels of Richardson, Fielding, and Smollett seldom exceeded 4,000 copies [and] … only when an author’s star was in the ascendant did a publisher venture to order 2,000 copies in a first edition” (p. 50). Considering that almost 6 million people lived in Britain in 1750, this figure is proportionate to Wroth’s figures for early American imprints. Sales figures changed dramatically by the first decades of the nineteenth century, however, when, for example, Byron’s The Corsair (1814) sold ten thousand copies on its first day in print and twenty-five thousand copies within a month. Britain was the world leader in the production of mechanized printing operations and, by 1814, was already gearing up its technology to supply the demands of Byron’s eager readers. For the parallel German history, see Rolf Engelsing, Der Bürger als Leser: Lesergeschichte in Deutschland, 1500–1800 (Stuttgart: Metzlersche, 1974); and Albert Ward, Book Production, Fiction and the German Reading Public, 1740–1800 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1974).

7. John Tebbel, A History of Book Publishing in the United States, 4 vols. (New York: R. R. Bowker, 1972), 1:210, 222.

8. For an overview of the early American book industry, see Milton Hamilton, The Country Printer (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1936); Lehmann-Haupt, Wroth, and Silver, eds., The Book in America; Douglas C. McMurtrie, The Book: The Story of Printing and Bookmaking (New York: Covici, Friede, 1937); Charles Madison, Book Publishing in America (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966); Rollo G. Silver, The American Printer; 1787–1825 (Charlottesville: Univ. Press of Virginia, 1967), and The Boston Book Trade, 1800–1825 (New York: New York Public Library, 1949); John Tebbel, A History of Book Publishing and The Media in America (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1974), esp. chap 7; Lawrence C. Wroth, The Colonial Printer (Portland, Me.: South worth-Anthoensen, 1938); and Mary Ann Yodelis, “Who Paid the Piper? Publishing Economics in Boston, 1763–1775,” Journalism Monographs, 38 (1975), 1–49.

9. Few early American publishers kept press figures, and even fewer press records survive to the present. For an excellent discussion of the problem, see G. Thomas Tanselle, “Some Statistics on American Printing, 1764–1783,” in Bailyn and Hench, eds., The Press and the American Revolution, pp. 315–63; and Tanselle, “Press Figures in America: Some Preliminary Observations,” in Studies in Bibliography, ed. Fredson Bowers (Charlottesville: Univ. Press of Virginia, 1966), 19:123–60. Mathew Carey’s records are among the most complete. His account books are in the Manuscript Department at the AAS, and his other papers are at the Pennsylvania Historical Society, Philadelphia. See also Earl L. Bradsher, Mathew Carey: Editor; Author and Publisher; a Study in American Literary Development (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1912); Silver, The American Printer, app., pp. 172–74, and “Mathew Carey, 1760–1839,” Antiquarian Bookman (February 1, 1960), p. 355. For a fascinating firsthand account of eighteenth-century publishing practices, see Mathew Carey, Autobiography (New York: Research Classics, 1942).

10. Frank L. Schick, The Paperbound Book in America: The History of Paperbacks and Their European Background (New York: R. R. Bowker, 1958), pp. 40–45. Wayne E. Fuller in The American Mail (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1972) notes that by 1814 novels were already being distributed by the postal service. He quotes one postmaster general, Return J. Meigs, who attempted to forbid the mailing of books because, Meigs insisted, “the mails were … overcrowded with novels and the lighter kind of books for amusement” (p. 119).

11. Cooper received no financial remuneration from the English edition of Precaution (1820) and learned from this experience that he had to make separate arrangements with each of his publishers. He went on to become a shrewd entrepreneur of literature. His second novel, The Spy (1821), had, by 1825, gone through four New York editions, three British editions, two French translations, and one German translation. For a detailed account, see The Fiction of James Fenimore Cooper: An Exhibition of American, English and Continental Editions and Manuscripts… (Charlottesville: Univ. of Virginia Library, 1974), pp. 1–36.

12. Most of America’s women printers such as Ann Franklin of Newport, R.I., inherited printing shops from their fathers or husbands. See Margaret L. Ford, “Ann Franklin: Colonial Newport Printer,” paper presented at the AAS, August 1984; and, for a general account of these unusual women, Leona M. Hudak, Early American Women Printers and Publishers, 1639–1820 (Metuchen: Scarecrow, 1978).

13. William Charvat, Literary Publishing in America, 1790–1850 (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1959), p. 26. Further indication of how much the publishing business was decentralized can be seen in the fact that in the early nineteenth century in Massachusetts twenty-four separate printers published editions of the Bible. See Margaret T. Hills, ed., The English Bible in America (New York: American Bible Society, 1961); and David D. Hall, “The Uses of Literacy in New England, 1600–1850,” in Printing and Society in Early American, ed. William L. Joyce et al. (Worcester, Mass.: AAS, 1983), pp. 8–9.

14. Novelist Samuel Woodworth compiled one of the most curious American advice books, The Complete Coiffeur: An Essay on the Art of Adorning Natural and of Creating Artificial Beauty (1817), which includes several plates of elegant British and French hairstyles and instructions on how such tonsorial splendors might be adapted by the American fair sex.

15. James D. Hart, The Popular Book: A History of America’s Literary Taste (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1950), p. 45. A. Owen Aldridge disputes this figure in Man of Reason: The Life of Thomas Paine (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1959), p. 42, although he does note that the first edition of Common Sense, which ran to one thousand copies, sold out in two weeks.

16. I am indebted to Elizabeth Carroll Reilly for making available to me her excellent unpublished paper “Cheap and Popular Books in Mid-Eighteenth-Century New England.”

17. Paul M. Spurlin, “Readership and the American Enlightenment,” in Literature and History in the Age of Ideas, ed. C.G.S. Williams (Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press, 1975), p. 368.

18. Elijah R. Sabin, The Life and Reflections of Charles Observator (Boston: Rowe and Hooper, 1816), p. 3. Another indication of the sheer numbers of available books (even allowing for evangelical hyperbole) is the American Tract Society’s report that it had distributed 13 million tracts worldwide between 1799 and 1814. See Constitution of the American Tract Society (Boston: Flagg and Gould for the American Tract Society, 1814), p. 5.

19. Carl Bridenbaugh and Jessica Bridenbaugh, Rebels and Gentlemen: Philadelphia in the Age of Franklin (1942; repr., New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1965), p. 80; and Lewis P. Simpson, “The Printer as a Man of Letters: Franklin and the Symbolism of the Third Realm,” in The Oldest Revolutionary: Essays on Benjamin Franklin, ed. J. A. Leo Lemay (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1976), pp. 3–20.

20. Charvat, Literary Publishing in America, p. 41.

21. See Isaiah Thomas’s letter to Jeremy Belknap, November 3, 1792, Thomas Papers, Manuscript Department, AAS, where Thomas notes that he has made several (costly) revisions in his editions of William Perry’s Spelling Book and expresses alarm that Belknap plans to publish his own version of the book: “I think you too generous, after being acquainted with the circumstances, to do anything which would be injurious to me,” Thomas pleads. Only “by way of retaliation” would one reputable printer ever act in such an underhanded manner toward another.

22. Tanselle, in “Some Statistics on American Printing,” notes that in Charles Evan’s American Bibliography (Chicago: Printed for the author by the Blakely Press, 1903–34), “a great many of the … entries refer to items that never existed, as a result of his [Evans’s] interpretation of titles announced in booksellers’ advertisements” (p. 321). The practice is also discussed by Silver, The American Printer, p. 104; and Robert B. Winans, “Bibliography and the Cultural Historian: Notes on the Eighteenth-Century Novel,” in Printing and Society in Early America, p. 176.

23. Parke Rouse, The Printer in Eighteenth-Century Williamsburg (Williamsburg: Colonial Williamsburg Press, 1958), p. 21.

24. Charles Brockden Brown, in his capacity as magazine editor, noted: “I have often been amused in observing the vast difference between writing and printing. A miserable scrawling hand, never to be decyphered but by the study of the context, … filled with interlineations and blots, and nice adjustment of points and capitals totally neglected is metamorphosed by that magical machine, the press, into the perfection of beauty, regularity, and accuracy.” Literary Magazine and American Register, ι (November 1803), 83. See also Silver, The American Printer, p. 93; and Tebbel, A History of Book Publishing, 1:112.

25. It is not the province of this study to determine how much authority printers granted to the texts they published, but it might be fruitful for future researchers to compare, for example, how much textual variation existed between one edition of a novel and another versus variations between different editions of the Bible. The procedures of printing themselves embody ideologies as has been argued eloquently by French historians of livre et société such as François Furet et al., Livre et société dans la France du XVII siècle, 2 vols. (Paris et La Haye: Mouton et Cie, 1965, 1970); and Geneviève Bollème, La Bibliothèque bleue: Littérature populaire en France du XVI au XIX siècles (Paris: Gallimard, Juillard, 1971). See also Robert Darnton, The Business of Enlightenment: A Publishing History of the Encyclopédie, 1775–1800 (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1979).

26. One of the most extreme cases of a printer exerting artistic control over an early American novel is seen in the 1841 edition of Tabitha Tenney’s popular novel, Female Quixotism (1801). Originally published by Isaiah Thomas and E. T. Andrews of Boston as two volumes bound in one, by 1825 J. P. Peaslee bound each volume separately and included a frontispiece and a vignette title page with each volume. But when George Clark republished the book in 1841, he published it in three volumes, in the manner of popular British novels. He actually renumbered the chapters in order to create the extra volume, thus violating the transition Tenney conceived in this early bildungsroman between volume one and two. Clark also hired an engraver to imitate the style of the earlier illustrations in two new illustrations made for the new volume.

27. The novelist Francis Hopkinson, in Plan for the Improvement of the Art of Paper War (Philadelphia: Mathew Carey, 1787), suggested, in a delightful satire on eighteenth-century typography, that printing could be made still more expressive if “every degree of vociferation” by a writer or character were printed in a different size and style of type.

28. Advertisement for Emily Hamilton, a Novel. Founded on Incidents in Real Life. By a Young Lady of Worcester County (Worcester, Mass.: Isaiah Thomas, Jr., 1803). The advertisement appeared in the Massachusetts Spy, or Worcester Gazette on October 20, 1802; December 1 and 29, 1802; and January 5, 1803. The advertisement also contained the full title of the novel and a portion of the preface, but no author’s name and no description of the plot or contents of the book. This emphasis on the appearance of books (and especially their bindings) is also attested to by the many letters sent by Mason Locke Weems to his employer, Mathew Carey: “The Eye is every thing—charm that and you are safe. They won’t look at boards—I tell you again the eye is all, all, all!” See H. Glen Brown, “Philadelphia Contributions to the Book Arts and Book Trade, 1796–1810,” Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 37 (1943), 275–92. Clearly books, then as now, had a status function as well as a literary one.

29. Bernard Bailyn, Education in the Forming of American Society; Needs and Opportunities for Study (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1960), pp. 95, 93.

30. Spurlin, “Readership and the American Enlightenment,” pp. 362–64; and U.S. Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States: Colonial Times to 1957 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1960).

31. Joseph Dennie to Royall Tyler, August 30, 1797, in The Letters of Joseph Dennie, 1768–1812, ed. Laura G. Pedder (Orono: Univ. of Maine Press, 1936), p. 165.

32. These figures come from the detailed lists of expenses at the back of Ethan Allen Greenwood’s diaries, December 30, 1805, to February 9, 1806, Manuscript Department, AAS, and corroborated by Carroll D. Wright, History of Wages and Prices in Massachusetts: 1752–1883 (Boston: Wright and Potter, 1885), p. 13. The establishment of regular steamship routes by the 1820s cut both time and cost between seaports approximately in half.

33. “Summary Account of the Book Stock and Other Property of Isaiah Thomas, Taken August 20, 1813,” box 9, Isaiah Thomas Papers.

34. Charvat, Literary Publishing in America, pp. 17–24.

35. Tebbel, A History of Book Publishing, 1:240; and James M. Wells, “Book Typography in the United States of America,” in Book Typography, 1815–1965, ed. Kenneth Day (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1965), p. 331.

36. Cynthia Z. Stiverson and Gregory A. Stiverson, “The Colonial Retail Book Trade: Availability and Affordability of Reading Material in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Virginia,” in Printing and Society in Early America, p. 147.

37. Reilly, “Cheap and Popular Books”; see also her “The Wages of Piety: The Boston Book Trade of Jeremy Condy,” in Printing and Society in Early America, pp. 83–131.

38. William J. Gilmore, “Elementary Literacy on the Eve of the Industrial Revolution: Trends in Rural New England, 1760–1830,” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society, 92 (1982), 124. See also Edward M. Cook, Jr., The Fathers of the Towns: Leadership and Community Structure in Eighteenth-Century New England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1976); Jackson Turner Main, The Social Structure of Revolutionary America (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1965); and Allan R. Pred, Urban Growth and the Circulation of Information: The United States System of Cities, 1790–1840 (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1973). For the relationship between literacy and the market economy, see Gilmore, “Elementary Literacy,” p. 159; and David Cressy, Literacy and the Social Order: Reading and Writing in Tudor and Stuart England (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1980).

39. It is important to note in this regard that the issue is access to publishing centers, not simple population. At the time of the first census (1790), for example, 48.5 percent of the population was in the Southern states, with Virginia being the single most populous state in the Union. These figures, however, include freed blacks and slaves to whom literacy was often denied (and even illegal). For a discussion of these figures, see Russel B. Nye, The Cultural Life of the New Nation: 1776–1830 (New York: Harper & Row, 1960), p. 250; and Spurlin, “Readership and the American Enlightenment,” pp. 364–66. Nye counts fifty booksellers in Boston in the 1770s and over thirty in Philadelphia. In contrast, a number of important studies emphasize the impediments to obtaining books in the South. See Richard Beale Davis, Intellectual Life in the Colonial South, 1586–1763 (Knoxville: Univ. of Tennessee Press, 1978), esp. chap. 4; Joseph F. Kett and Patricia A. McClung, “Book Culture in Post-Revolutionary Virginia,” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society, 94 (1984), 97–138; George K. Smart, “Private Libraries in Colonial Virginia,” American Literature\ 10 (March 1938), 24–52; Stiverson and Stiverson, “The Colonial Book Trade,” pp. 132–73; and Louis B. Wright, The First Gentlemen of Virginia: Intellectual Qualities of the Early Colonial Ruling Class (1940; repr., Charlottesville, Va.: Dominion, 1964). The Stiverson’s note that the only active bookseller in Virginia in the mid-eighteenth century had a book trade limited to approximately 230 customers per year, and, in one year, he sold only 2,028 books (excluding almanacs). For a firsthand account of the scarcity of books in the rural South, see the autobiographical Life of the Reverend Devereux Jarratt (Baltimore: Warner & Hanna, 1806).

40. Quoted in Reilly, “Cheap and Popular Books,” from the Acts and Resolves of the Province of Massachusetts–Bay, 1713, 1721, and 1726.

41. For a fuller discussion, see J. R. Dolan, Yankee Peddlers of Early America (New York: Bramhall House, 1964); Priscilla Carrington Kline, “New Light on the Yankee Peddler,” New England Quarterly, 12 (1939), 80–98; and Richardson Wright, Hawkers and Walkers in Early America (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1927). For a comparative discussion, see Victor E. Neuburg, Chapbooks: A Bibliography of References to English and American Chapbooks of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (London: Vine, 1964), and Neuburg, The Penny Histories (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1969). And for a contemporaneous account, Isaiah Thomas, The History of Printing in America, ed. Marcus A. McCorison (New York: Weathervane, 1970), pp. 131, 133, 141, 153, 303, 524.

42. Tebbel, A History of Book Publishing, 1:111–16; and James Gilreath, “American Book Distribution,” paper presented at the AAS, Worcester, Mass., November 2, 1984.

43. For a delightful account of the life of a literary agent, see Parson Weems’s letters to his employer, written between 1795 and 1825, in E.E.F. Skeel, Mason Locke Weems, 3 vols. (New York: Random House, 1929), vols. 2, 3. Weems was the author not only of mythmaking biographies, but also of such sensational titles as The Lover’s Almanac (1798), Hymen’s Recruiting Sergeant (1799), God’s Revenge Against Murder (1807), God’s Revenge Against Gambling (1810), God’s Revenge Against Adultry (1815), and The Bad Wife’s Looking Glass (1823). It might also be noted that over the course of his life, Weems often appended his own name (gratuitously) to the books he sold, beginning with a 1799 pamphlet on George Washington that Weems revised only slightly. See Dean G. Hall, “Mason Locke Weems,” in American Writers Before 1800, ed. James A. Levernier and Douglas R. Wilmes (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1983), p. 1545, and Lewis Leary, The Book-Peddling Parson (Chapel Hill, N.C.: Algonquin Books, 1984).

44. Tebbel, A History of Book Publishing, 1:115. For an excellent discussion of Weems’s business practices (including his methods for obtaining subscriptions to future publications), see James Gilreath, “Mason Weems, Mathew Carey, and the Southern Booktrade, 1794–1810,” Publishing History, 10 (1981), 27–49.

45. Quoted by Earl L. Bradsher, Mathew Carey, p. 31.

46. Earl L. Bradsher, “Early American Book Prices,” Publishers Weekly, 83 (March 8, 1913), 862; and Donald McKenzie, “Printers of the Mind: Some Notes on Bibliographical Theories and Printing-House Practices,” Studies in Bibliography, 22 (1969), 1–75.

47. Wright, History of Wages and Prices, pp. 63–65.

48. The History of Constantius and Pulchera (Leominster, Mass.: Charles Prentiss for Robert B. Thomas, 1797). This unusually inexpensive version of the novel was sold by Robert B. Thomas in his Sterling, Mass., bookshop along with other inexpensive editions of popular books (chiefly British in origin if not in manufacture) such as History of Charles Grandison ($.25) and Edward Moore’s Fables for the Ladies ($.37). An advertisement at the back of S.S.B.K. Wood’s Ferdinand and Elmira indicates that another edition of The History of Constantius and Pulchera could be purchased in Baltimore in 1802 from the shop of Samuel Butler for $.75.

49. U.S. Department of Labor, History of Wages in the United States from Colonial Times to 1928 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1929), pp. 53, 57, 133–34, 137.

50. Greenwood diaries, log at the end of the diary for December 30, 1805, to February 9, 1806. A night at the theater, however, also cost Greenwood $.75, putting it directly in competition with novels as an evening’s literary entertainment.

51. Christopher Clark, “Household Economy, Market Exchange, and the Rise of Capitalism in the Connecticut Valley, 1800–1860,” Journal of Social History, 13 (Winter 1979), 170. See also Michael Merrill, “Cash Is Good to Eat: Self-sufficiency and Exchange in the Rural Economy of the United States,” Radical History Review, 4 (Winter 1977), 42–71. For a detailed statistical account of how printers were paid and what they published, see Yodelis, “Who Paid the Piper?”

52. This advertisement appeared throughout 1782 in the Massachusetts Gazette and General Advertiser, which was then being published, with little success, in Springfield.

53. Sukey Vickery, Emily Hamilton (1803), rear flyleaf. In 1785, Isaiah Thomas so desperately needed supplies that he paid Thomas Evans of London with a shipment of potash. This was not, however, the typical or preferred method of payment. See Clifford K. Shipton, Isaiah Thomas: Printer; Patriot, and Philanthropist, 1749–1831 (Rochester, N.Y.: Leo Hart, 1948), p. 45.

54. Isaiah Thomas Papers, esp. box 9, “Accounts of Stock at the Walpole Store”; Mathew Carey Account Books, passim. See also Stiverson and Stiverson, “The Colonial Retail Book Trade,” pp. 144–45.

55. Samuel Goodrich, Recollections of a Lifetime, 2 vols (New York: Miller, Orton, 1857), 1:64, 86.

56. Spurlin, “Readership and the American Enlightenment,” p. 366. See Lehmann-Haupt, Wroth, and Silver, eds., The Book in America, pp. 50–60; and Howard Mumford Jones, “The Importation of French Literature in New York City, 1750–1800,” Studies in Philology, 28 (1931), 241.

57. See Silver, “Three Eighteenth-Century Book Contracts,” Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 47 (1953), 383.

58. Winans, “Bibliography and the Cultural Historian,” p. 176.

59. Jesse H. Shera, “The Beginnings of Systematic Bibliography in America, 1642–1799,” in Essays Honoring Lawrence C. Wroth, ed. Frederick Richmond Goff et al. (Portland, Maine: Anthoensen, 1951), p. 274. See also Shera, Foundations of the Public Library (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1949). For a fascinating description of the first social library in Belpre, Ohio (a town settled in 1788, its library founded in 1796), see William H. Venable, Beginnings of Literary Culture in the Ohio Valley (New York: R. Clark, 1891), p. 135.

60. Autobiography and Other Writings by Benjamin Franklin, ed. Russel B. Nye (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1958), pp. 71–72.

61. Sarah Savage, The Factory Girl, by a Lady (Boston: Munroe, Francis, and Parker, 1814), esp. pp. 35–40, 54–55.

62. Records of the Union Harwinton Library, ed. Terry Belanger (New York: Book Arts Press, School of Library Service, Columbia Univ., 1977), pp. 5; 3.

63. George Raddin, An Early New York Library of Fiction, with a Checklist of the Fiction of H. Caritat’s Circulating Library, No. 1, City Hotel, Broadway, New York, 1804 (New York: H. W. Wilson, 1940), pp. 14–16. A bookplate listing the bylaws of the Philadelphia Circulating Library is attached to the copy of Brockden Brown’s Edgar Huntly (Philadelphia: H. Maxwell, 1799) owned by the AAS. An advertisement in the Massachusetts Mercury (April 18, 1797, p. 3) includes the terms for the Pelham Library. By way of comparison, Raddin (p. 15) notes that the Samuel Berrian Library in New York charged subscribers only $4.50 a year while the Melitiah Nash Library, also in New York, charged $3.50. On the other hand, the unnamed circulating library that Greenwood joined in Massachusetts assessed its members $1 per month. In any of these cases, however, it was still far cheaper to borrow than to buy large quantities of books.

64. While lending-library rosters are notoriously incomplete, it can at least be ventured that the number of book readers in the new Republic advanced far ahead of population growth. Winans has calculated that in the five largest cities in America, the number of social libraries increased tenfold between 1770 and 1780, while the circulating libraries (for which far less data has survived) increased at least threefold and probably much more. See “The Growth of a Novel-Reading Public in Late-Eighteenth-Century America,” Early American Literature, 9 (Winter 1975), 268–69.

65. I am grateful to Robert Gross for this information on the Concord Library.

66. Raddin, An Early New York Library of Fiction, pp. 35–104. See also Winans, “Growth of a Novel-Reading Public,” pp. 274–75, for other figures such as the John Mien Circulating Library (Boston, 1765) that included 35 percent fiction, and W. P. & L. Blake’s Circulating Library (Boston, 1800) that included 65 percent fiction. See also Winans’s invaluable bibliography, A Descriptive Checklist of Book Catalogues Separately Printed in America, 1693–1800 (Worcester, Mass.: AAS, 1981); and Thomas, History of Printing, pp. 151, 429.

67. John Davis, Travels of Four Years and a Half in the United States of America During 1798, 1799, 1800, 1801, and 1802 (New York: Henry Holt, 1909), p. 204.

68. Raddin, An Early New York Library of Fiction, pp. 24–25.

69. Autobiography… by Benjamin Franklin, p. 72.

70. Farmer’s Weekly Museum. This weekly advertisement ran from July 24 to October ι, 1798. Perhaps to keep himself attuned to the market, Thomas purchased two shares in the Worcester Social Library (Massachusetts) in 1813 (this at a time when his own personal library was valued at $4,000 and probably far outstripped the resources of the town collection). See Isaiah Thomas Papers, Accounts of Stock, box 9.

71. See esp. Michel Foucault, “What Is an Author?” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1977), pp. 113–38.

72. Translated and quoted by Woodmansee, “The Genius and the Copyright,” p. 425, from Georg Heinrich Zinck, Allgemeines Oeconomisches Lexicon (1753).

73. Silver, The American Printer, p. 98.

74. G. Thomas Tanselle, “Author and Publisher in 1800: Letters of Royall Tyler and Joseph Nancrede,” Harvard Library Bulletin, 15 (1967), 135–36, 133.

75. The approximate figures here are intentional. When dealing with anonymous authors, it is often impossible to tell whether two titles represent the work of two separate anonymous authors or two books by one. Similarly, the whole definition of a “novel” was very flexible in the early national period, with some novelists pretending to be nonfiction writers and vice versa. I have intentionally retained the traditional flexible definition of what constitutes an early American novel, a practice followed by Lyle Wright in his excellent bibliography, American Fiction 1774–1850 (1939; rev. ed., San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1948).

76. Sukey Vickery Papers, letter of February 13, 1802, Manuscript Department, AAS. For the full text of this letter and a discussion of the author and her work, see my “Female Authorship and Authority: The Case of Sukey Vickery,” Early American Literature, 21 (Spring 1986), 4–28.

77. S.S.B.K. Wood, Julia, and the Illuminated Baron. A Novel: Founded on Recent Facts Which Have Transpired in the Course of the Late Revolution of Moral Principles in France. By A Lady of Massachusetts (Portsmouth, N.H.: Charles Peirce, 1800), pp. iii-v.

78. S.S.B.K. Wood, Ferdinand and Elmira, a Russian Story (Baltimore: Samuel Butler, 1804), p. 3. It is always difficult to know how much such statements represent merely a conventional or pro forma argument, but it does seem significant that Wood herself secured the copyright on one of her novels, Dorval, or the Speculator (1801), suggesting at least a passing interest in the business of authorship. See also Helene Koon, “Sally Say ward Barrell Wood,” in American Women Writers, ed. Lina Mainiero, 4 vols. (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1982), 4:452–54.

79. Several nineteenth-century “sentimental” novelists pretended to write as an avocation but actually wrote out of necessity. Louisa May Alcott, to cite the most obvious example, supported her parents (for all his fame, Bronson was a feeble provider), her siblings, and even the children of her siblings. She wrote, “Goethe puts his joys and sorrows into poems; I turn mine into bread and butter.” Quoted in Raymond L. Kilgour, Messrs. Roberts Brothers Publishers (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1952), p. 113. For a sensitive and perceptive discussion of nineteenth-century women writers, see Mary Kelley, Private Woman, Public Stage (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1984).

80. Silver, “Three Eighteenth-Century Book Contracts,” pp. 381–82. As a single woman, it should be noted, Hannah Adams often had to have her contracts cosigned by men, her own signature having no legal weight.

81. Hannah Adams, A Memoir of Miss Hannah Adams, Written by Herself (Boston: Gray and Rowen, 1832), p. 34. Adams attributes this particular observation to British author Charlotte Smith.

82. Silver, “Three Eighteenth-Century Book Contracts,” p. 386.

83. Tebbel, A History of Book Publishing, 1:152; see also Emily E. Skeel, “Salesmanship of an Early American Best Seller,” Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 32 (1938), 38–46.

84. Noah Webster to Isaiah Thomas, June 25, 1788, Isaiah Thomas Papers.

85. Quoted by William Charvat, The Profession of Authorship in America, 1800–1870: The Papers of William Charvat, ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli (Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press, 1968), p. 5.

86. Tebbel, History of Book Publishing, 1:139–43; see also Rollo G. Silver, “Prologue to Copyright in America: 1722,” Studies in Bibliography: Papers of the Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia, 51 (1958), pp. 259–62.

87. For a discussion of the impact of the copyright laws, see Frederick Richmond Goff, “The First Decade of the Federal Act for Copyright, 1790–1800,” in Essays Honoring Lawrence C. Wroth, ed. Frederick Richmond Goff et al. (Portland, Maine: Anthoensen, 1951); and Ruth Leonard, “Bibliographical Importance of Copyright Records,” College and Research Libraries, 7 (January 1946), 34–40.

88. Silver counts only 556 copyrights granted between 1790 and 1800; see The American Printer, p. 113.

89. Charvat, Profession of Authorship, p. 5.

90. See Wallace Putnam Bishop, “The Struggle for International Copyright in the United States,” Ph.D. diss., Boston Univ., 1959.

91. Letter of January 11, 1803, repr. in Silver, “The Book Trade,” Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 46 (1952), 42.

92. Tebbel, History of Book Publishing, 1:134. Silver, “The Book Trade,” p. 33, presents a somewhat more positive view.

93. Massachusetts Centinel, February 7, 1789. The British price of the four-volume edition was $8; Thomas promised to sell it for $5.

94. See esp. [Mathew Carey], Wages of Female Labour (Philadelphia: Matthew Carey, 1829), which discusses the seamstresses employed by the government to make uniforms. “This is no ‘fancy sketch’—no imaginary portrait drawn to excite compassion or horror. It is a tremendous reality, revolting to every honorable or humane feeling. And will not public indignation wipe away this foul stain from the character of our city?” (n.p.).

95. Charles G. Steffen, The Mechanics of Baltimore: Workers and Politics in the Age of Revolution, 1763–1812 (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1984), p. 210.

96. Alfred F. Young, “ ‘By Hammer and Hand All Arts Do Stand’: An Interpretation of Mechanics in the Era of the American Revolution,” paper presented at the Organization of American Historians, San Francisco, April 1980, and discussed by Steffen, Mechanics of Baltimore, p. 276. See also Young’s “The Mechanics and Jeffersonians: New York, 1789–1801,” Labor History, 5 (1964), 247–76.

97. Steffen, Mechanics of Baltimore, 211.

Chapter 3

1. Royall Tyler, The Algerine Captive, ed. Don L. Cook (New Haven: College & Univ. Press, 1970), p. 27.

2. New York Magazine, n.s., 2 (1797), 398.

3. Selected Writings of John and John Quincy Adams, ed. Adrienne Koch and William Peden (New York: Knopf, 1946), p. 148.

4. Anthony Giddens, Central Problems in Social Theory: Action, Structure, and Contradiction in Social Analysis (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1979), p. 6.

5. Giddens, Central Problems in Social Theory, p. 193.

6. For a survey of magazines, see William J. Free, The Columbian Magazine and American Literary Nationalism (The Hague: Mouton, 1968), esp. pp. 61–63; and Frank Luther Mott, A History of American Magazines, 1741–1850 (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1966), esp. chap. 2.

7. Jürgen Habermas, Toward a Rational Society, trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro (Boston: Beacon, 1968), p. 99. See also, Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1977), pp. 112–13.

8. The most interesting case is Jefferson. He praised or condemned fiction according to the status of the audience he addressed. See The Works of Thomas Jefferson in Twelve Volumes, ed. Paul Leicester Ford (New York: G. P. Putman’s, 1905), 12:91, for a condemnation and his letter to Charles Brockden Brown, quoted in David Lee Clark, Charles Brockden Brown: Pioneer Voice of America (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1952), p. 164, for a positive evaluation. See also Jefferson’s letter of August 3, 1771, to Robert Skipwith recommending that several novels be included in the young gentleman’s library (repr. in Gordon S. Wood, The Rising Glory of America, 1760–1820 [New York: George Braziller, 1971], pp. 170–74).

9. Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1961), esp. pp. 41–43.

10. Williams, The Long Revolution, p. 113, and his Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1976), esp. pp. 76–82, 145–48, 281–84.

11. Since numerous commentators have written at length on the censure of fiction, I have not analyzed that critique but have focused instead on a few telling examples of it. For a detailed discussion of the censure, see Jean-Marie Bonnet, La Critique littéraire aux États-Unis, 1783–1837 (Lyon: Presses Universitaires, 1982), pp. 97–156; William Charvat, The Origins of American Critical Thought, 1819–1835 (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1936), esp. chaps. 2, 7; G. Harrison Orians, “Censure of Fiction in American Romances and Magazines, 1789–1810,” PMLA, 52 (1937), 195–214; Ormond E. Palmer, “Some Attitudes Toward Fiction in America to 1870, and a Bit Beyond,” Ph.D. diss., Univ. of Chicago, 1952; and Sergio Perosa, American Theories of the Novel: 1793–1903 (New York: New York Univ. Press, 1983), p. 4.

12. William Hill Brown, The Power of Sympathy, ed. William S. Kable (Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press, 1969), p. 25.

13. See Norman Grabo, Edward Taylor (New York: Twayne, 1961), p. 25; David D. Hall, “The Uses of Literacy in New England, 1600–1850,” in Printing and Society in Early America, ed. William L. Joyce et al. (Worcester, Mass.: AAS, 1983), pp. 26–27; Christopher M. Jedrey, The World of John Cleaveland: Family and Community in Eighteenth-Century New England (New York: Norton, 1979), p. 103; and Thomas Goddard Wright, Literary Culture in Early New England, 1620–1730 (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1920). As a point of comparison, see Rolf Engelsing, “Die Perioden der Lesergeschichte in der Neuzeit,” in Zur Sozialgeschichte deutscher Mittel—und Unterschichten (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1973), pp. 112–54. (Special thanks to William J. Gilmore for bringing this important essay to my attention.)

14. William Hill Brown, The Power of Sympathy, p. 25.

15. Dell Hymes, “Models of the Interaction of Language and Social Life” Journal of Social Issues, 23 (1967), 8–28.

16. “Character and Effects of Modern Novels,” Weekly Magazine, March 10, 1798, 185.

17. Quoted in Nina Baym, Novels, Readers, and Reviewers: Responses to Fiction in Antebellum America (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1984), p. 29.

18. Fredric Jameson, “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture,” Social Text, 1 (Winter 1979), 136.

19. Mikhail M. Bakhtin, “Epic and Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist and ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1981), pp. 38, 37, 39.

20. Nathan O. Hatch, “Elias Smith and the Rise of Religious Journalism,” in Printing and Society in Early America, pp. 250–77. It has also been argued, convincingly, that the first major challenge to traditional authority in America came with the Great Awakening. Although this is not the focus of my own discussion, I have certainly profited from Jay Fliegelman, Prodigals and Pilgrims: The American Revolution Against Patriarchal Authority, 1750–1800 (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1982), pp. 103–55; Alan Heimert, Religion and the American Mind: From the Great Awakening to the Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1966); James A. Henretta, The Evolution of American Society, 1700–1815 (Lexington, Mass.: D. C. Heath, 1973); and Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (New York: Knopf, 1963), esp. pt. 2, chap. 3.

21. Gordon S. Wood, “The Democratization of Mind in the American Revolution,” in The Moral Foundations of the American Republic, 2nd ed., ed. Robert H. Horwitz (Charlottesville: Univ. Press of Virginia, 1979), pp. 102–28.

22. Rhys Isaacs, “Books and the Social Authority of Learning: The Case of Mid-Eighteenth-Century Virginia,” in Printing and Society in Early America, pp. 248–49. See also his The Transformation of Virginia, 1740–1790 (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1982).

23. “On Modern Novels, and Their Effects,” Massachusetts Magazine, or Monthly Museum, 3 (1791), 663.

24. “An Essay on the Modern Novel,” Port Folio, 2 (April 10, 1802), 107.

25. New England Quarterly, 1 (1802), 172–74. A headnote accompanying the article indicates that it was originally published in the Monthly Mirror (presumably, the British periodical) in November 1797.

26. William Hill Brown, The Power of Sympathy, p. 3.

27. The neglect of women and the inattention to the ideology of sexuality in the classical sociological literature (including most contributions by the New Left) is truly alarming. For an overview of the problem, see the excellent essay by Judith Stacey and Barrie Thorne, “The Missing Feminist Revolution in Sociology,” Social Problems, 32 (April 1985), 301–16. For a corrective to the Marxist failure to come to terms with feminism and an excellent analysis of the relationship between gender and power, see Nancy C. M. Hartsock, Money, Sex, and Power: Toward a Feminist Historical Materialism (New York: Longman, 1983), esp. pp. 155–58. See also Robert Padgug, “Sexual Matters,” Radical History Review, 20 (Spring-Summer 1979), 3–24; and Jeffrey Weeks, Sex, Politics, and Society (New York: Longman, 1981).

28. Patricia Murphy Robinson, “The Historical Repression of Women’s Sexuality,” in Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality (Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984), p. 252.

29. See esp. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 3 vols., trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon, 1978), vol. 1; Sherry B. Ortner and Harriet Whitehead, “Accounting for Sexual Meanings,” in Sexual Meanings: The Cultural Construction of Gender and Sexuality (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1981), pp. 1–27; and Ellen Ross and Rayna Rapp, “Sex and Society: A Research Note from Social History and Anthropology,” in Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality, ed. Ann Snitow, Christine Stansell, and Sharon Thompson (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1983), pp. 51–73.

30. “Character and Effects of Modern Novels,” Weekly Magazine, 1 (March 10, 1798), 185.

31. Samuel Miller, A Brief Retrospect of the Eighteenth Century, 2 vols. (New York: T. & J. Swords, 1803), 2:179. See also Miller’s “The Appropriate Duty and Ornament of the Female Sex,” in The Columbian Preacher; or, A Collection of Original Sermons, from Preachers of Eminence in the United States. Embracing the Distinguishing Doctrines of Grace (Catskill: Nathan Elliott, 1808), p. 253.

32. Enos Hitchcock, Memoirs of the Bloomsgrove Family. In a Series of Letters to a Respectable Citizen of Philadelphia, 2 vols. (Boston: I. Thomas and E. T. Andrews, 1790), 2:186–87, 184

33. Hitchcock, Memoirs of the Bloomsgrove Family, 2:29.

34. For a useful discussion, and some working definitions, of “class” in the early republic, see Jackson Turner Main, The Social Structure of Revolutionary America (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1965), esp. pp. 197–220.

35. For an overview of the Scottish Common Sense philosophers, see Louis Schneider’s introductory essay in The Scottish Moralists on Human Nature and Society (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1967). A different perspective is provided by Gladys Bryson, Man and Society: The Scottish Inquiry of the Eighteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1945). The role these writers played in America has been cogently argued by both Emory Elliott, Revolutionary Writers: Literature and Authority in the New Republic, 1725–1810 (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1982), pp. 30–35; and Terence Martin, The Instructed Vision: Scottish Common Sense Philosophy and the Origins of American Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1961). For a quantitative survey of the availability of these writers in America, see David Lundberg and Henry F. May, “The Enlightened Reader in America,” American Quarterly, 28 (Summer 1976), 261–62, app.

36. Timothy Dwight, Travels in New England and New York, 4 vols. (New Haven: T. Dwight, 1821), 1:518.

37. A number of the attacks on the novel insinuated the lowly class origins of novelists, including the anonymous “Essay on the Modern Novel” (Port Folio, 2 [April 10, 1802], 106) that attributed the “levity and licentiousness” of the novel to the “Angelinas and Celestinas who have exchanged a washing-tub for a writing-desk.”

38. William Hill Brown, The Power of Sympathy, p. 5.

39. Monima was first published in New York by P. R. Johnson in 1802; repr. in 1803 by T. B. Jansen of New York as well as by Eaken and Mecum of Philadelphia. In 1847, J. H. Gould of Philadelphia published the novel as Monima; or, The Beautiful French Girl in Philadelphia. A Tale of Thrilling Interest Founded on Facts. By H. Haydn. The quotation is from the New York (1803) ed., pp. v–vi. The novel was loosely adapted from English and French sources.

40. Charles Brockden Brown, “Novel-Reading,” Literary Magazine and American Register, 1 (March 1804), 405.

41. Helena Wells, The Step-Mother: A Domestic Tale, from Real Life (London: T. N. Longman and O. Rees, 1799), p. vi.

42. Dwight, Travels in New England, 1:516.

43. E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Pantheon, 1964), p. 61.

44. Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding (1957; repr., Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1967), esp. pp. 9–34; and Bakhtin, Dialogic Imagination, pp. 84–258.

45. Autobiography and Other Writings by Benjamin Franklin, ed. Russel B. Nye (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1958), p. 19.

46. James McHenry, “On the Causes of the Present Popularity of Novel Writing,” American Monthly Magazine, 2 (July 1824), 8, 2.

47. Baym, Novels, Readers, and Reviewers.

48. Isaacs, The Transformation of Virginia; and David Reynolds, “From Doctrine to Narrative: The Rise of Pulpit Story-Telling in America,” American Quarterly, 32 (Winter 1980), 479–98. For a concise analysis of the classic Puritan sermonic form, see Teresa Toulouse, “ ‘The Art of Prophesying’: John Cotton and the Rhetoric of Election,” Early American Literature, 19 (Winter 1984), 279–99. For a discussion of the contiguity of oral and print culture, see Donald M. Scott, “Print and the Public Lecture System, 1840–1860,” in Printing and Society in Early America, pp. 278–99. And for a different analysis of the relationship between ministerial authority and nineteenth-century culture, see Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (New York: Knopf, 1978).

49. Baym, Novels, Readers, and Reviewers, pp. 27–28.

50. Allan Cunningham, “Some Account of the Life and Works of Sir Walter Scott,” North American Review, 36 (April 1833), 310.

Chapter 4

1. Royall Tyler, The Algerine Captive, ed. Don L. Cook (New Haven: College & University Press, 1970), pp. 27–28.

2. Charles Francis Adams, ed., The Works of John Adams, 10 vols. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1850–56), 3:456.

3. Lyle H. Wright, “Eighteenth-Century American Fiction,” in Essays Honoring Lawrence C. Wroth, ed. Frederick Richmond Goff et al. (Portland, Maine: Anthoensen, 1951), p. 459. Wright also notes that the 1790 census counted the number of “free white males” under the age of sixteen but made “no separate tabulation of young girls” (p. 459), which also reflects who officially counted.

4. Kenneth A. Lockridge, Literacy in Colonial New England (New York: Norton, 1974), esp. pp. 38–42, 57–58.

5. Earlier versions of my discussion of literacy were incorporated into unpublished papers presented at the Modern Language Association conventions in Los Angeles (December 1982), New York (December 1983), and Washington, D.C. (December 1984).

6. David D. Hall, “The World of Print and Collective Mentality in Seventeenth-Century New England,” in New Directions in American Intellectual History, ed. John Higham and Paul K. Conkin (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1979), p. 173.

7. One of the best accounts of black education remains Carter G. Woodson, The Education of the Negro Prior to 1861 (1919; repr., New York: Arno, 1968). See also Patricia A. Herman, Southern Blacks: Accounts of Learning to Read Before 1861, Reading Education Report No. 53 (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois, 1985); Bert James Loewenberg and Ruth Bogin, Black Women in Nineteenth-Century American Life (University Park: Pennsylvania State Univ. Press, 1976), p. 5; Philip D. Morgan, “Black Society in the Lowcountry, 1760–1810,” in Slavery and Freedom in the Age of the American Revolution, ed. Ira Berlin and Ronald Hoffman (Charlottesville: Univ. Press of Virginia, 1983), pp. 83–141; and Mary Beth Norton, Liberty’s Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1750–1800 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1980), pp. 258–59. Other analyses can be found in Daniel Perlman, “Organizations of the Free Negro in New York City, 1800–1861 “Journal of Negro History, 56 (1971), 181–97; and Harry C. Silcox, “Delay and Neglect: Negro Public Education in Ante-Bellum Philadelphia, 1800–1860,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 97 (1973), 444–64. John Hope Franklin, in From Slavery to Freedom: A History of American Negroes, 2nd ed. (New York: Knopf, 1956), calculates that, as late as 1870, 80 percent of all blacks above the age of ten were illiterate.

8. By surveying the Boston Post-Boy from 1750 to 1760, Robert B. Winans has discovered forty-two ads for runaway slaves, six of which specify that the adult male runaway can read (five of these six designating reading and writing abilities). However, by surveying ten other newspapers from Boston and Philadelphia, between 1750 and 1800, he has found that only about 5 percent of the advertisements specify reading (between 3.5 to 4 percent of that number also indicate writing ability). I am very grateful to Robert Winans for making these preliminary figures on a very important subject available to me. Important theoretical work on black literacy is being done by Hortense Spillers who finds that, historically for blacks and especially for slaves, literacy and religious conversion are synonymous experiences, and understanding the Word of God means, literally and symbolically, being able to understand words (literacy). See, for example, her “A Drama of Words: Afro-American Sermons and the Development of Community,” unpublished paper presented at the Modern Language Association, Washington, D.C., December, 1984. And for a powerful firsthand account, see Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, rev. ed. (1892; repr., London: Collier, 1962): “[Master Hugh] forbade [his wife] to give me any further instruction, telling her in the first place that to do so was unlawful, as it was also unsafe, ‘for,’ said he … ‘learning will spoil the best nigger in the world.… If you teach him how to read, he’ll want to know how to write, and this accomplished, he’ll be running away with himself’ ” (pp. 78–79).

9. Jackson Turner Main, The Social Structure of Revolutionary America (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1965), p. 156; and William J. Gilmore, “Elementary Literacy on the Eve of the Industrial Revolution: Trends in Rural New England, 1760–1830,” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society, 92 (1982), 98.

10. Christopher M. Jedrey, The World of John Cleaveland: Family and Community in Eighteenth-Century New England (New York: Norton, 1979), pp. 102, 179.

11. Linda Auwers, “The Social Meaning of Female Literacy: Windsor, Connecticut, 1660–1775,” Newberry Papers in Family and Community History, 77–4A (Chicago: Newberry Library, 1977); Ross W. Beales, Jr., “Studying Literacy at the Community Level: A Research Note,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 9 (1978), 93–102; Harvey Graff, The Literacy Myth (New York: Academic, 1979); and Lockridge, Literacy in Colonial New England.

12. David D. Hall, “On Native Ground: From the History of Printing to the History of the Book,” 1983 James Russell Wiggins Lecture in the History of the Book in American Culture (Worcester, Mass.: AAS, 1984), p. 23. The “Gordian knot” Hall here refers to is the statistical discrepancy among the various quantitative studies, largely a result of the different communities under study. Auwers posits, for example, almost universal female literacy before 1760 for the established and relatively wealthy town of Windsor, Conn. Yet, like the other quantifiers, she also documents a rise in both male and female literacy over the course of the eighteenth century. See also Geraldine Jonçich Clifford, “Buch and Lesen: Historical Perspectives on Literacy and Schooling,” Review of Educational Research, 54 (1984), 472–500; and Carl F. Kaestle, “The History of Literacy and the History of Readers,” Review of Research in Education,, 12 (1985).

13. Gordon S. Wood, in a review/essay in the New York Review of Books (Decernber 16, 1982), assented to the call by eminent historians such as G. R. Elton and Oscar Handlin for a return to “old-fashioned epistemology” based on the idea that truth is “absolute as the world is real” (p. 59). Dissatisfaction with current historical praxis has also been expressed by Thomas Bender in “Making History Whole Again,” New York Times Book Review, September 10, 1985. Bender expresses alarm over the increasing fragmentation of history and the focusing on smaller and smaller areas of investigation. He calls for a new time of “synthesis” (p. 43). And in Class and Society in Early America (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1970), esp. pp. 166–200, Gary B. Nash analyzes the kinds of unacknowledged assumptions that can be embedded in even the most meticulous quantitative studies. (Neither Bender nor Nash, it must be added, calls for positivism.)

14. Margaret Spufford, Small Books and Pleasant Histories: Popular Fiction and Its Readership in Seventeenth-Century England (1981; repr., Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1982), esp. pp. 19–44.

15. Auwers, “Social Meaning of Female Literacy,” p. 8. Lockridge (Literacy in Colonial New England, p. 127) also notes the example of modern Israeli women who have learned to fake a signature, a common enough experience among illiterates in a society that equates intelligence with literacy.

16. Linda K. Kerber, Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1980), p. 164.

17. Gilmore, “Elementary Literacy,” pp. 87–88, quotes two perceptive essays by Benjamin Nelson, “Actors, Directors, Roles, Cues, Meanings, Identities: Further Thoughts on ‘Anomie,’ ” Psychoanalytic Review, 51 (1964), 135–60; and “Civilizational Complexes and Intercivilizational Encounters,” Sociological Analysis, 34 (1973), 79–105.

18. Many of these assumptions have been adapted from the work of British historian Roger Schofield. See especially “Dimensions of Illiteracy, 1750–1850,” Explorations in Entrepreneurial History, 10 (1973), 437–54; and his “The Measurement of Literacy in Pre-Industrial England,” in Literacy in Traditional Societies, ed. Jack P. Goody (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1968), pp. 311–25. Schofield argues partly on the basis of the methods of British public education, especially in the Charity Schools, where writing was not only not taught to poor children, but actually discouraged. For other studies of the British situation, see David Cressy, Literacy and the Social Order: Reading and Writing in Tudor and Stuart England (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1980); and Cressy, “Literacy in Pre-Industrial England,” Societas, 4 (Summer 1974), 229–49; Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy (London: Chatto & Windus, 1957); Margaret Spufford, Contrasting Communities: English Villagers in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1974), chaps. 7, 8; and Lawrence Stone, “Literacy and Education in England, 1640–1900,” Past and Present, 42 (1969), 61–139. While all of these studies illuminate aspects of English education, it is not at all clear that generalizations based on English data apply to the different tradition of American Puritan education.

19. New England Primer Improved (Boston: D. and J. Kneeland, 1761).

20. For a comparative discussion of literacy levels (including different interpretations of conflicting data), see Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (London: Temple Smith, 1978), esp. p. 250; Bernhard Fabian, “English Books and Their Eighteenth-Century German Readers,” in The Widening Circle: Essays on the Circulation of Literature in Eighteenth-Century Europe, ed. Paul J. Korshin (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1976), p. 166; and Egil Johansson, The History of Literacy in Sweden, Educational Reports No. 12 (Ume$: Ume$ Univ. Press, 1977), esp. pp. 55–60.

21. As Abigail Adams wrote to her niece about the shortcomings of her own writing skills, “It is from feeling the disadvantages of it myself, that I am the more solicitous that my young acquaintance should excel me.” Charles Francis Adams, ed., Letters of Mrs. Adams, the Wife of John Adams, 3rd ed., 2 vols. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1841), 2:79. Adams, it should be noted, was almost as literate as her husband, but many wealthy women were not. For example, Deborah Franklin, wife of Benjamin, was nearly illiterate. Similarly, Eldridge Gerry courted a daughter of a state legislator, Catharine Hunt, who could not even read his love letters. For other notable examples of female illiteracy even among the highborn, see Kerber, Women of the Republic, pp. 190–93.

22. Walter J. Ong, The Presence of the Word: Some Prolegomena for Cultural and Religious History (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1967), esp. pp. 245–55. The first comment by Abigail Adams is quoted in The Spur of Fame: Dialogues of John Adams and Benjamin Rush, 1805–1813, ed. John A. Schutz (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1966), p. 170; the second, in Adams Family Correspondence, 4 vols., ed. Lyman H. Butterfield et al. (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1963–73), 3:52.

23. Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1961), p. 125.

24. Stanley K. Schultz, The Culture Factory: Boston Public Schools, 1789–1860 (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1973), pp. 4–5. See also George Leroy Jackson, The Development of School Support in Colonial Massachusetts (New York: Arno, 1969); and George Emory Littlefield, Early Schools and School-Books of New England (Boston: Club of Odd Volumes, 1904), p. 56.

25. Bernard Bailyn, Education in the Forming of American Society (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1960); and Lawrence Cremin, American Education: The Colonial Experience (New York: Harper & Row, 1970). See also, Ellwood P. Cubberley, Public Education in the United States, rev. ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1934).

26. Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America (New York: Basic Books, 1976); Michael B. Katz, Class, Bureaucracy, and Schools: The Illusion of Educational Change in America, 2nd ed. (New York: Praeger, 1975), and The Irony of Early School Reform: Educational Innovation in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Massachusetts (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1968); and Michael Zuckerman, Peaceable Kingdom: New England in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Knopf, 1970), esp. pp. 72. 83. For an excellent example of how personal ideology influences the shape of scholarship, compare the interpretations of essentially the same “data” in Katz, The Irony of Early School Reform (pt. 1), and in Maris A. Vinovskis, The Politics of Educational Reform in Nineteenth-Century Massachusetts: The Controversy over the Beverly High School in 1860 (Washington, D.C.: National Institute of Education, 1980). While Katz sees class division in the controversy over publicly funding schools, Vinovskis argues that how one voted on the issue depended primarily upon where one lived (regardless of one’s class affiliation or income level).

27. Katz, Class, Bureaucracy, and Schools, p. xviii; see also Kaestle, Pillars of the Republic: Common Schools and American Society, 1780–1860 (New York: Hill & Wang, 1983), p. 35.

28. E. Jennifer Monaghan, “The Three R’s: Notes on the Acquisition of Literacy and Numeracy Skills in Seventeenth-Century New England,” paper presented at the American Educational Research Association, New Orleans, 1984. I am grateful to Professor Monaghan for making this paper available to me.

29. Walter H. Small, “Girls in Colonial Schools,” Education, 22 (1902), 532.

30. Edmund S. Morgan quoted in Michael B. Katz, ed., Education in American History (New York: Praeger, 1973), p. 30. See also Edmund S. Morgan, The Puritan Family: Religion and Domestic Relations in Seventeenth-Century New England, rev. ed. (New York: Harper & Row, 1966).

31. Benjamin Rush, “Thoughts upon Female Education” (1787), repr. Essays on Education in the Early Republic, ed. Frederick Rudolph (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1965), p. 28.

32. Nancy F. Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood: “Woman’s Sphere” in New England, 1780–1835 (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1977), p. 103.

33. Caleb Bingham, “Oration upon Female Education, Pronounced by a Member of One of the Public Schools in Boston” (September 1791), repr. in his American Preceptor; 44th ed. (Boston: Manning & Loring, 1813), pp. 48–50.

34. Kerber, Women of the Republic, pp. 189–231; Norton, Liberty’s Daughters, pp. 256–99. See also Carl F. Kaestle and Maris A. Vinovskis, Education and Social Change in Nineteenth-Century Massachusetts (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1980), pp. 25–26; and Thomas Woody, A History of Women’s Education in the United States, 2 vols. (New York: Science Press, 1929), 1: chap. 4. For a contemporaneous account, see William Bentley, The Diary of William Bentley, D.D., Pastor of the East Church, Salem, Mass., 4 vols. (Salem: Essex Institute, 1905–14), 2:96: “We saw at no school any girls” (July 1, 1794). Working on the Salem School Committee in 1790, the Reverend Bentley noted that “all the girls [are] unprovided for, as upon the Boston establishment” (1:188).

35. Schultz, The Culture Factory, p. 15.

36. Emory Washburn, Brief Sketch of the History of Leicester Academy (Boston: Phillips, Samson, 1855), esp. pp. 19–34. Washburn notes that increasing pressure was exerted upon the academy to teach a more standard “feminine” curriculum, pressure to which the academy partially yielded after 1815.

37. Benjamin Rush, “Plan on the Establishment of the Public Schools” (1786), repr. Rudolph, Essays on Education, p. 3.

38. Noah Webster, “On the Education of Youth in America.” Originally published in Webster’s American Magazine (1787–88); repr. American Museum, the Hampshire Gazette, and the American Journal of Education, as well as in Noah Webster, A Collection of Essays and Fugitive [sic] Writings, on Moral, Historical, Political and Literary Subjects (Boston: Thomas and Andrews, 1790), repr. Rudolph, Essays on Education, p. 65.

39. For a survey of other views, see Abraham Blinderman, American Writers on Education Before 1865 (Boston: Twayne, 1975); and Vera M. Butler, Education as Revealed by New England Newspapers Prior to 1850 (1935; repr., New York: Arno, 1969).

40. Schultz, The Culture Factory, pp. 8–9.

41. Ibid., pp. 10–11.

42. Ibid., p. 23.

43. Kaestle and Vinovskis, Education and Social Change, p. 17. See also Albert Fishlow, “The American Common School Revival: Fact or Fancy?” in Industrialization in Two Systems, ed. Henry Rosovsky (New York: Wiley, 1966), esp. p. 43; and Kaestle, The Evolution of an Urban School System: New York City, 1750–1850 (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1973), pp. 52, 54, 89.

44. Edward Everett Hale quoted in Kaestle, Pillars of the Republic, pp. 52–53.

45. Charles L. Coon, North Carolina Schools and Academies (1790–1840) (Raleigh: Edwards and Broughton, 1915), pp. 763–64.

46. Diary of Elizabeth Bancroft, Manuscript Department, AAS; and Tyler, The Algerine Captive, p. 59.

47. E. Jennifer Monaghan, A Common Heritage: Noah Webster’s Blue–Back Speller (Hamden, Conn.: Shoe String Press, 1983), p. 219. See also Harry R. Warfel, Noahj Webster: Schoolmaster to America (1936; repr., New York: Octagon, 1966).

48. Sukey Vickery Papers, Diary entry for December 18–22, 1815, Manuscript Department, AAS.

49. These instructions were published in virtually all editions of Webster’s speller and have been discussed, in depth, by Dennis Patrick Rusche, in “An Empire of Reason: A Study of the Writings of Noah Webster,” Ph.D. diss., Univ. of Michigan, 1975, pp. 269–70. See also Mitford M. Mathews, Teaching to Read (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1966), pp. 53–63.

50. Susanna Rowson, A Spelling Dictionary, Divided into Short Lessons, for the Easier Committing to Memory by Children and Young Persons; and Calculated to Assist Youth in Comprehending What They Read (1807; repr., Portland: Isaac Adams, 1815), p. iii.

51. Juvenile Mirror, and Teacher’s Manual, Comprising a Course of Rudimental Instruction (New York: Smith and Forman, 1812), p. 24. See also, “Learning to Read,” The Ladies’ Magazine, 2, no. 1 (1829), 91. For a more conventional overview of early American textbooks than that presented here, see Butler, Education as Revealed by New England Newspapers, esp. pp. 402–36; Charles Carpenter, History of American Schoolbooks (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1963); John A. Nietz, Old Textbooks (Pittsburgh: Univ. of Pittsburgh Press, 1961), and his The Evolution of American Secondary School Textbooks (Rutland, Vt.: Tuttle, 1966).

52. Joseph Neef, The Method of Instructing Children Rationally in the Arts of Writing and Reading (Philadelphia: By the author, 1813), esp. pp. 6–19. Neef particularly advocated reform in English-language orthography in order that the mass of people might more easily become literate, and, therefore, socially activist.

53. Joshua Leavitt, Easy Lessons in Reading for the Use of the Younger Classes in Common Schools (Keene, N.H.: J. Prentice, 1823). Leavitt also wrote an exceptionally popular book for seamen, Devotional Assistant and Mariner’s Hymns (1830), as well as Cheap Postage: Remarks and Statistics on the Subject (1848) and an antislavery tract, Alarming Disclosures: Political Power of Slavery (1816). In short, he, too, was an educational and social reformer.

54. William Baker quoted in Ray Nash, Writing: Some Early American Writing Books and Masters (Hanover, N.H.: Privately printed, 1943), p. 43. See also Nash, “Abiah Holbrook and His ‘Writing Master’s Amusement,’ ” Harvard Library Bulletin, 7 (Winter 1953), 88–104; Nash, American Writing Masters and Copybooks (Boston: Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 1959); and Nash, American Penmanship, 1800–1815 (Worcester, Mass.: AAS, 1969).

55. John Jenkins, The Art of Writing (Boston: Isaiah Thomas, 1791), epigraph. In an “improved” edition published in 1809, Jenkins emphasizes the public utility of his writing system and the public gain he hopes will accrue to the author: “From the comparatively short time, and a trifling expense, necessary to attain the ART of PENMANSHIP, by the use of this system, the public may save MILLIONS OF DOLLARS” (p. 1).

56. The Short, Plain, and Cheap Directions for Reading Books to Profit (New York: J. Seymour, 1809), pp. 1–4.

57. Sarah Savage, Advice to a Young Woman at Service: In a Letter from a Friend (New York: New York Book Society, 1823), pp. 31, 4.

58. Diary of Susan Heath, September 11 and October 6, 1812, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston. Special thanks to Elizabeth C. Reilly for this reference.

59. Elisabeth Haseltines’s entry dated February 9, 1821, in An Extract from the Journal of John Nelson: Being an Account of God’s Dealing with Him from His Youth to the Forty-Second Year of His Age (New York: John Wilson and Daniel Hitt for the Methodist Connection in the United States, 1809). This copy is in the Pedagogy Collection in the Russel B. Nye Popular Culture Collection, Michigan State University.

60. Although Uri Decker has underscored her name and the word “MINE” on the flyleaf, it has also been inscribed by Sally D [?], H. Baker, and others whose names are now indecipherable. This edition of Lindley Murray’s English Reader was published in Canandaigua, N.Y., by J. D. Bemis in 1819, and the copy is in the Michigan State University Pedagogy Collection.

61. Quioted in G. Thomas Tanselle, “Author and Publisher in 1800: Letters of Royall Tyler and Joseph Nancrede,” Harvard Library Bulletin, 15 (1967), 137–38.

62. In 1786, when Isaiah Thomas published a toy-book edition of Robinson Crusoe, no full unedited text of the novel was published at that time in America or, for that matter, in England. For an excellent discussion of some of the American editions of the novel (what was included and what was left out), see Jay Fliegelman, Prodigals and Pilgrims: The American Revolution Against Patriarchal Authority, 1750–1800 (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1982), pp. 67–81.

63. For example, in the 1794 edition of Charlotte, Mathew Carey advertised other books by Rowson as well as Wollstonecraft’s The Rights of Women [sic] (for $1), suggesting that he anticipated a primarily female (and feminist?) audience. In an 1811 edition of the same novel, most of the books advertised at the back are juvenile works, as are the preponderance of books in the 1815 edition of Sarah Savage’s The Factory Girl. Conversely, in a 1793 edition of Rowson’s textbook, Universal Geography, nearly all of the ads are for books by or about women, including some novels.

64. Rolf Engelsing, Analphabetentum und Lektüre: Zur Sozialgeschichte des Lesens in Deutschland zwischen feudaler und industrieller Gesellschaft (Stuttgart: Metzlersche, 1973); and Der Bürger als Leser: Lesergeschichte in Deutschland 1500–1800 (Stuttgart: Metzlersche, 1974). The main points of Engelsing’s arguments are summarized in his essay “Die Perioden der Lesergeschichte in der Neuzeit,” in Zur Sozialgeschichte deutscher Mittelund Unterschichten (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1973), pp. 112–54. It should also be noted that Engelsing’s critique of extensive reading is not particularly new. The anonymous author of “Female Reading,” Boston Weekly Magazine, 2 (March 31, 1804), condemned novels, “read with avidity, they pleasure for a moment, but in a short time after they [females] have finished them, they are forgot and another of the same kind, though gilded by the name of novelty, sought for.” The reviewer, incidentally, believed women should, instead, read guidebooks to help prepare them for “rendering domestic life happy” (p. 89).

65. Engelsing’s work has recently been criticized on several fronts. See, for example, Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (New York: Basic Books, 1984), pp. 249–52; and Reinhart Siegert, Aufklärung und Volkslektüre exemplarisch dargestellt an Rudolph Zacharias Becker und seinem “Nothund Hülfsbüchlein” mit einer Bibliographie zum Gesamtthema (Frankfurt am Main: Buchhändler–Vereinigung, 1978).

66. The controversy over the fictionality of Charlotte Temple was revived on December 10, 1853, when a fire destroyed the Walton House in New York City (purportedly the house from which the pregnant and abandoned Charlotte had been expelled). Throughout the century, there had been public debate over the authenticity of Charlotte’s grave in the Trinity Church cemetery. See, for example, the New York Dispatch for August 13, 1859: “[The novel’s] simplicity of style and apparent sincerity has imposed upon a good many people, who made themselves believe that a mere romance was veritable history.”

67. Darnton, Great Cat Massacre, p. 251.

68. Hannah More, Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education, 2 vols. (1799; repr., New York: George Long, 1813), 2:26.

69. Mary M. Ball wrote her poems in the 1821 edition (published in Exeter, N.H.); her copy is now in the Michigan State University Pedagogy Collection.

70. Margaret Smith quoted in Shirley Brice Heath, “Toward an Ethnohistory of Writing in American Education,” in Writing: The Nature, Development and Teaching of Written Communication, ed. Marcia Farr Whiteman, 2 vols. (Hillsdale, N.J.: Erlbaum, 1981), 1:29.

71. Diary of Patty Rogers, January 10 and 11, 1785, Manuscript Department, AAS.

72. Betsey Sweet’s copy of Charlotte Temple (New York: John Swain, 1802) is in the AAS. Beginning with Mathew Carey’s 1797 edition, virtually all later editions of the novel include the last name of the heroine in the title.

73. The 1809 copy of Charlotte Temple described on p. 75 (Philadelphia: Mathew Carey, 1809) was found in a bookstore in New York in 1979, whereabouts presently unknown. The others (see p. 75) are all at the AAS. Their publishing data, respectively, are: New York: Samuel A. Burtus, 1814; Hartford: Silas Andrus, 1832; Philadelphia: Mathew Carey, 1812; and Philadelphia: Benjamin Warner, 1818.

74. The publishing data for the copies of Charlotte Temple discussed on pp. 75–77 are: Hudson, N.Y.: Ashbel Stoddard, 1803; Chambersburg, Pa.: George Kenton Harper, 1807; New Haven: Bronson, Walter, 1808.

75. William T. Dunn’s copy of Charlotte Temple (Boston: Charles Ewer, 1824) is a multiple monument to the power of books: It was given to me by another scholar who shares my fascination with America’s first best-selling novel.

76. The AAS copies discussed on p. 77 were published, respectively, in: New Haven: Increase Cooke, 1805; Cincinnati: U.P. James, 1833; and Cincinnati: William Conclin, 1831.

77. This copy of Samuel Relf’s Infidelity, or the Victims of Sentiment (Philadelphia: W. W. Woodward, 1797) is at the AAS.

78. E. D. Robinson signed in Rebecca Rush, Kelroy, a Novel (Philadelphia: Bradford and Inskeep, 1812); Harriet Wilkins Shaftsbury signed in Charlotte Temple (Philadelphia: Mathew Carey, 1808). Other AAS copies of Charlotte Temple containing especially intriguing evidence of handwriting practice and an evolution of literacy skills are: Philadelphia: Mathew Carey, 1797; Hudson, N.Y.: Nathan Elliott, 1808; New York: R. Hobbs, 1827; and Hartford: Silas Andrus, 1829.

79. This second edition of Rowson’s Spelling Dictionary (Portland, Maine: A. & J. Shirley, 1815) is at the AAS as is the copy of the first edition of Foster’s The Coquette (Boston: Samuel Etheridge, 1797).

80. The copy of The History of Constantius and Pulchera published by Edward Gray (pp. 78–79) is at the AAS.

Chapter 5

1. William Charvat, The Profession of Authorship in America, 1800–1870: The Papers of William Charvat, ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli (Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press, 1968), p. 6.

2. Robert Escarpit, Sociology of Literature, 2nd ed., trans. Ernest Pick (London: Frank Cass, 1971), esp. pp. 55–74, and The Book Revolution (London: George G. Harrap, 1966), pp. 17–49.

3. Bernard Rosenthal, “Introduction” to Critical Essays on Charles Brockden Brown, ed. Bernard Rosenthal (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1981), p. 2; p. 18, n. 6. Charles Brockden Brown has most recently been dubbed “Father of the American Novel” (without explanation) by Philip Young, “ ‘First American Novel’: The Power of Sympathy, in Place,” College Literature, 11 (1984), 115–24.

4. Nina Baym, in “A Minority Reading of Wieland,” in Critical Essays on Charles Brockden Brown, has suggested there is “androcentricity in the idea of [Brockden Brown’s] seriousness,” p. 87; p. 101, n. 1.

5. For a concise summary of the whole debate, see William S. Kable, “Introduction,” The Power of Sympathy (Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press, 1969), pp. xi-xv. For the intriguing history of Brackenridge and Freneau’s Father Bombo’s Pilgrimage to Mecca (published for the first time in 1975), see Michael Davitt Bell’s excellent introduction (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Library, 1975), pp. ix–xxxii.

6. William C. Spengemann, “The Earliest American Novel: Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 38 (1984), 384. It must also be remembered that Aphra Behn is not generally acknowledged as the “first British novelist” either, an omission which should be corrected by Dale Spender’s Mothers of the Novel (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986).

7. See also William C. Spengemann, “What Is American Literature?” Centennial Review, 22 (Spring 1978), 119–38.

8. Joseph Tinker Buckingham, Specimens of Newspaper Literature, 2 vols. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1850), 1:323; and Francis S. Drake, The Town of Roxbury (Boston: Printed for the author, 1878), p. 134.

9. For a full discussion of the scandal as well as a detailed chronology of the various public and private ascriptions of The Power of Sympathy to Sarah Wentworth Morton (Mrs. Perez Morton), see Emily Pendleton and Milton Ellis, Philenia: The Life and Works of Sarah Wentworth Morton, 1759–1846 (Orono: Univ. of Maine Press, 1931), esp. pp. 32–40, 109–12.

10. Arthur W. Brayley, “The Real Author of ‘The Power of Sympathy,’ ” Bostonian, 1 (1894). Rebecca Volentine Thompson also reported to Brayley the story that I have used as the epigraph to this chapter. For more evidence of William Hill Brown’s authorship see John R. Byers, Jr., “Further Verification of the Authorship of The Power of Sympathy,” American Literature, 43 (November 1971), 421–26; Milton Ellis, “The Author of the First American Novel,” American Literature, 4 (1933), 359–68; Ellis, “Bibliographical Note” in The Power of Sympathy (New York: Fascimile Text Society, 1937); Tremaine McDowell, “The First American Novel,” American Review, 2 (November 1933), 73–81; Richard Walser, “Boston’s Reception of the First American Novel,” Early American Literature, 17 (Spring 1982), 65–74; Walser, “The Fatal Effects of Seduction (1789),” Modern Language Notes, 69 (1954), 574–76; Walser, “More About the First American Novel,” American Literature, 24 (1952), 352–57; Walser, “The North Carolina Sojourn of the First American Novelist,” North Carolina Historical Review, 29 (1951), 138–55.

11. Herbert Ross Brown, “The Great American Novel,” American Literature, 7 (1935), 1–14.

12. Bostonian, 1 (1894–95); and Mrs. Perez Morton, The Power of Sympathy, ed. Walter Littlefield (Boston: Cupples and Patterson, 1894). Milton Ellis edited the Facsimile Text Society edition in 1937; Herbert Ross Brown also edited a reprint of the novel (Boston: New Frontiers Press, 1961). The Kable edition (Columbus: Ohio State Univ., 1969) includes such scholarly apparatus as a “Textual Introduction,” “Emendations in the Copy-text,” “Variants in the first Edition,” and “Collation of the Massachusetts Magazine Passages” (pp. 185–206). The classroom paperback edition is edited by William S. Osborne (New Haven: College University Press, 1970). See also, John R. Byers, Jr., “A Letter of William Hill Brown’s,” American Literature, 49 (January 1978), 606–11; and William Hill Brown, Selected Poems and Verse Fables, 1784–1793, ed. Richard Walser (Newark: Univ. of Delaware Press, 1982).

13. See, for example, Michel Foucault, “History, Discourse, and Discontinuity,” trans. Anthony M. Nazzaro, Salmagundi, 20 (1972), 229–33.

14. My discussion of Isaiah Thomas is based on my work with the Isaiah Thomas Papers at the AAS (the fifteen boxes of papers and twenty-three volumes touch upon virtually every aspect of the book trade in the new Republic) as well as on Jacob Chernofsky, “Isaiah Thomas,” in Boston Printers, Publishers, and Booksellers, 1640–1800, ed. Benjamin Franklin V (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1980), p. 470; Annie Russell Marble, From ‘Prentice to Patron: The Life Story of Isaiah Thomas (New York: Appleton-Century, 1935); Charles Lemuel Nicholas, Isaiah Thomas: Printer; Writer; and Collector (New York: Burt Franklin, 1971); and Clifford K. Shipton, Isaiah Thomas: Printer; Patriot, and Philanthropist, 1749–1831 (Rochester, N.Y.: Leo Hart, 1948). See also, Isaiah Thomas, Three Autobiographical Fragments, ed. Marcus A. McCorison (Worcester, Mass.: AAS, 1962).

15. Isaiah Thomas, The History of Printing in America, ed. Marcus A. McCorison (New York: Weathervane, 1970); and Marcus A. McCorison, “Isaiah Thomas, the American Antiquarian Society, and the Future,” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society, 91 (1981), 27–38.

16. In History of Printing, Thomas describes Fowle as “a singular man, very irritable and effeminate, and better skilled in the domestick work of females, than in the business of a printing house.… Fowle could not be called an industrious man” (p. 134). Thomas’s memorable anecdotes about Fowle’s sloppy printing practices (arbitrary placement of punctuation, etc.) are certainly the former apprentice’s best revenge against a cruel master.

17. John Tebbel, A History of Book Publishing in the United States, 4 vols. (New York: R. R. Bowker, 1972), 1:67.

18. Quoted by William F. Vartorella, “Isaiah Thomas,” in American Writers Before 1800, ed. James A. Levernier and Douglas R. Wilmes (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1983), p. 1450.

19. Daniel Defoe, Travels of Robinson Crusoe (Worcester, Mass.: Isaiah Thomas, 1786), p. 24.

20. These titles are included in the Printer’s File for Isaiah Thomas at the AAS, and most can also be found in Nichols’s bibliography, pp. 39–133. See also John Roger Osterholm, “The Literary Career of Isaiah Thomas, 1749–1831,” Ph.D. diss., Univ. of Massachusetts at Amherst, 1978. The quotation is from Shipton, Isaiah Thomas, p. 43.

21. Chernovsky, Boston Printers, p. 470; and Shipton, Isaiah Thomas, pp. 43–44. However, Marcus A. McCorison has argued that Thomas could not be the American publisher of Fanny Hill. See McCorison, “Two Unrecorded Printings of Fanny Hill,” Vermont History (1972), 64–66, 174, and his “Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure or Fanny Hill in New England,” American Book Collector, 1 (1980), 29–30. Although there are a number of references to clandestine publishing ventures in Thomas’s diaries and letters I have found no mention of Fanny Hill.

22. The copy of Emily Hamilton from which I have quoted Thomas’s ambivalent verdict on novels is at the AAS.

23. The first advertisement for The Power of Sympathy appeared in the Herald of Freedom on January 16, 1789, the second on January 23, 1789. The “First American Novel” ads ran in the Massachusetts Spy, or Worcester Gazette on January 29, February 5, and February 12, 1789, and in the Massachusetts Centinel on January 28, 1789. I have not been able to find any prepublication advertisements in newspapers outside Massachusetts. For a more detailed discussion, see also Richard Walser’s excellent essay, “Boston’s Reception,” 65–74.

24. All references are to the Kable edition of The Power of Sympathy. This epigraph is from the unnumbered title page (facing p. 9 of the Kable text). Hereafter page citations will be found parenthetically within the text.

25. Walser, “Boston’s Reception,” pp. 68–74, his “More About the First American Novel,” pp. 352–57. Walser discovered a satirical vignette—published anonymously and reprinted in the Herald of Freedom on February 12, 1789—that viciously burlesques the whole Apthorp/Morton affair, including Morton’s attempt to suppress The Power of Sympathy against his wife’s advice: “You better let it alone, I think, you will only render yourself more conspicuously infamous.” (The timing of the piece in the Herald of Freedom suggests Thomas may have had a hand in reprinting the satire for a wider newspaper audience.)

26. Clarence S. Brigham, “American Booksellers’ Catalogues, 1734–1800,” in Essays Honoring Lawrence C. Wroth, ed. Frederick Richmond Goff et al. (Portland, Maine: Anthoensen, 1951), pp. 33–34.

27. I am grateful to James Gilreath, American history specialist, Rare Books and Special Collections, for his help in investigating copies of early American novels at the Library of Congress, especially this rare copy of The Power of Sympathy.

28. The comments of Civil Spy and Antonia, appearing on pp. 96–97 of the text, are quoted from the following sources. The original review by Civil Spy is from the Massachusetts Centinel, February 7, 1789, 168; and the response by Antonia from the Herald of Freedom, February 10, 1789, 174; and the retort by Civil Spy from the Massachusetts Centinel, February 14, 1789, 179. A fourth contribution to this debate was supplied by one, Belinda, in the Herald of Freedom, February 20, 1789, 186. Belinda, “reports” the reactions of her aged “Aunt Antonia” upon hearing of the youthful Civil Spy’s disrespectful and impudent dismissal of Lady Antonia’s review. Antonia, as quoted by Belinda, insists that “the stripling who ridicules the MORAL PAGE OF INSTRUCTION will ever despise the precepts of old age,” and she summarily dismisses Civil Spy as a “pupil of Chesterfield.”

29. Mary Jacobus, “Is There a Woman in This Text?” New Literary History, 14 (Autumn 1982), 138.

30. Ross Chambers, Story and Situation: Narrative Seduction and the Power of Fiction (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1984).

31. Herald of Freedom, October 9, 1788, 51. The headline reads, “Inserted by Desire.”

32. Sarah Wentworth Morton stayed with Perez until his death in 1837. During the public scandal, she stood by her husband, but undoubtedly she was deeply affected by his affair. She bore five children in the first six years of her marriage to Perez (1781–87), her last just six months prior to her sister’s delivery of Perez’s illegitimate daughter, but she had no more after the scandal. Her later poetry is filled with references to a mother’s obligation to protect her children no matter what the cost and the necessity of female resignation.

33. William Hill Brown returned to the Apthorp/Morton scandal in The Better Sort or, the Girl of Spirit. An Operational, Comical Farce (Boston: Isaiah Thomas, 1789). In January 1789, just as the scandal was dying down, Charles Apthorp, Fanny’s brother, a gentleman and a naval officer, belatedly determined to uphold the family name by challenging Perez Morton to a duel. The challenge, apparently, was delivered and accepted half-heartedly, for local wits satirized how the men arrived at the appointed scene of their meeting after the local sheriff who conveniently forestalled the illegal encounter. Since these events occurred too late to be included in The Power of Sympathy, Brown included them in his farce, published in February of that year. But Brown also noted in the epigraph to the play: “Know, slander-loving readers, great and small, / We scorn on private Characters to fall—/ ‘They’re Knights of th’ Squire, and represent you all.’ ” For a fuller account, see Walser, “More About the First American Novel,” pp. 355–57.

34. For a fuller discussion of the ways in which the novel’s social authorities are continually undercut, see my “The Power of Sympathy Reconsidered: William Hill Brown as Literary Craftsman,” Early American Literature, 10 (1975), 14–29.

35. A letter/diary, half written to Perez Morton and half to herself, was composed by Fanny Apthorp shortly before her death and is now in the possession of the Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston. Herein Fanny proclaims her “guilty innocence” and her determination to die rather than face ignominy and abandonment. This missive was published in Boston newspapers as were responses, discussions, and further poems in the Massachusetts Gazette and General Advertiser (August 28, 1788), the Massachusetts Centinel (September 28 and August 4, 1788), and the Herald of Freedom (October 9, 13, and 16, 1788). So well known were the details of the scandal that it even became the basis for a school play performed in rural Vermont, The Fatal Effects of Seduction, A Tragedy. Written for the Use of the Students of Clio Hall, in Bennington, to Be Acted on Their Quarter Day, April 28, 1789. The only extant copy of the play is at the AAS. See also Tremaine McDowell, “Last Words of a Sentimental Heroine,” American Literature, 4 (1932), 174–77; Pendleton and Ellis, Philenia, pp. 32–40; and Walser, “Fatal Effects of Seduction,” pp. 574–76.

36. It might be noted, briefly, that William Hill Brown was the son of a mechanic—albeit one of the most skilled and prosperous mechanics of his day. Gawen Brown, an immigrant from Northumberland, was one of America’s most celebrated clockmakers, a craft that allowed him to support handsomely fourteen children (several of whom died in infancy) and three successive wives (the first two of whom died young). William Hill Brown was a product of Gawen’s third marriage to the widow, Elizabeth Hill Adams Brown.

37. Diary of Sarah Cornell Ayer (Portland, Maine: Lefavor-Tower, 1910), pp. 372–73.

38. P. D. Manvill, Lucinda; or, The Mountain Mourner. Being Recent Facts, in a Series of Letters (Johnstown, N.Y.: W. and A. Child, 1807). The 1810 edition published in Ballston Spa, N.Y., by William Child was the first to include the defense of the magistrates, a defense reprinted in most editions up until 1852.

39. I am grateful to Frank Shuffelton for allowing me to see his unpublished essay, “Mrs. Foster’s Coquette and the Decline of Brotherly Watch” (forthcoming in Eighteenth-Century Studies), which also cites the fine article by William E. Nelson, “Emerging Notions of Modern Criminal Law in the Revolutionary Era: An Historical Perspective,” New York University Law Review, 42 (1967), 450–82. See also, Perry Miller, The New England Mind (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1953), esp. pp. 19–130.

40. Most seduction stories—whether fictional or purported to be true—included in New England magazines and newspapers between 1777 and 1794 advocate that men should be punished for their role as seducer but, as in The Power of Sympathy, show women actually suffering the most from illicit sexuality, a realistic rather than an idealistic portrayal. See Herman R. Lantz et al., “Preindustrial Patterns in the Colonial Family in America: A Content Analysis of Colonial Magazines,” American Sociological Review, 33 (1968), 422–23.

41. Brown, like most of the early American novelists, was very concerned about education. For example, he vehemently championed the founding of the University of North Carolina. See Walser, “North Carolina Sojourn,” pp. 148–49.

42. For a further discussion of the incest motif, see Robert D. Arner, “Sentiment and Sensibility: The Role of Emotion in the Fallen World of William Hill Brown’s The Power of Sympathy,” Studies in American Fiction, 1 (1973), 121–32; and Young, “ ‘First American Novel,’ ” pp. 115–24.

Chapter 6

1. See Peter J. Rabinowitz, “Assertion and Assumption: Fictional Patterns and the External World,” PMLA, 97 (May 1981), 408–19.

2. J. Potter, “Growth of Population in the United States, 1700–1860,” in Population in History, ed. David Glass and D. Eversley (London: Arnold, 1965), p. 271.

3. Bernard Farber, Guardians of Virtue: Salem Families in 1800 (New York: Basic Books, 1972), p. 41; and Robert V. Wells, “Family History and Demographic Transition,” Journal of Social History, 9 (Fall 1975), 1–19.

4. For a perceptive discussion of the changing American attitude toward adolescence, see James Axtell, The School upon a Hill (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1974); and Joseph F. Kett, Rites of Passage: Adolescence in America, 1790 to the Present (New York: Basic Books, 1977), pp. 15–50.

5. The Patty Rogers Diary, Manuscript Department, AAS, records a constant and even exhausting round of social visiting as does the Elizabeth Bancroft Diary (also at AAS). The fluid social and courtship patterns of the early Republic are discussed in Ellen K. Rothman’s study of 350 women’s diaries, Hands and Hearts: A History of Courtship in America (New York: Basic Books, 1984).

6. The story of Mrs. Anderson is told in Sukey Vickery’s letter of July 19, 1799, to Adeline Hartwell, Sukey Vickery Papers, Manuscript Collection, AAS.

7. Mary Beth Norton, Liberty’s Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1750–1800 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1980), pp. 3–9.

8. Linda K. Kerber, Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1980), p. 252; and Alice Kessler-Harris, Women Have Always Worked (Old Westbury, N.Y.: Feminist Press, 1980), PP. 6–35.

9. Nancy F. Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood: “Woman’s Sphere” in New England, 1780–1835 (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1977), pp. 39–41. James A. Henretta, in The Evolution of American Society, 1700–1815: An Interdisciplinary Analysis (Lexington, Mass.: D.C. Heath, 1973), notes that in 1776 in Philadelphia alone over four thousand women and children earned minimum wages by “putting out” their spinning for the local textile mills (p. 194). See also, Edith Abbot, Women in Industry (New York: D. Appleton, 1918), pp. 66–70, 262–316; and Rolla M. Tyron, Household Manufactures in the United States, 1640–1860 (1917; repr., New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1966), pp. 124–33.

10. The Diaries of Julia Cowles: A Connecticut Record, 1797–1803, ed. Anna Roosevelt Cowles and Laura Hadley Moseley (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1931), pp. 40–41; and the diary of Elizabeth Drinker, especially the entries for June 20, 1795, and February 29, 1796, Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia.

11. Arthur W. Calhoun, A Social History of the American Family (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1917), 51–64; Philip J. Greven, Jr., Four Generations: Population, Land, and Family in Colonial Andover, Massachusetts (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1970), pp. 113–16; Henretta, Evolution of American Society, p. 133; Edward Shorter, “Illegitimacy, Sexual Revolution, and Social Change in Modern Europe,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 2 (1971), 237–72; Daniel Scott Smith, “The Dating of the American Sexual Revolution: Evidence and Interpretation,” in The American Family in Social-Historical Perspective, ed. Michael Gordon (New York: St. Martin’s, 1973), p. 323; and, especially, Daniel Scott Smith and Michael S. Hindus, “Pre-marital Pregnancy in America, 1640–1971: An Overview and Interpretation,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 5 (1975), 537–70.

12. Catherine M. Scholten, “ ‘On the Importance of the Obstetrick Art’: Changing Customs of Childbirth in America, 1760 to 1825,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 34 (July 1977), 426–28; Daniel Scott Smith, “Population, Family, and Society in Hingham, Massachusetts, 1635–1880,” Ph.D. diss., Univ. of California, Berkeley, 1972, pp. 219–25; and Robert V. Wells, “Qpaker Marriage Patterns in a Colonial Perspective, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 29 (July 1972), 422.

13. The Diaries of Julia Cowles, pp. 91–92, 94.

14. Daniel Scott Smith, “Family Limitation, Sexual Control, and Domestic Feminism in Victorian America,” in Clio’s Consciousness Raised, ed. Lois Banner and Mary Hartman (New York: Harper & Row, 1974), pp. 119–36.

15. Ansley J. Coale and Melvin Zelnick, New Estimates of Fertility and Population in the United States (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1963), pp. 35–36; Potter, “Growth of Population,” pp. 644–47, 663, 679; Warren C. Sanderson, “Quantitative Aspects of Marriage Fertility and Family Limitation in Nineteenth-Century America: Another Application of the Coale Specifications,” Demography, 16 (1979), 339–58; and Robert V. Wells, “Demographic Change and the Life Cycle of American Families,” in The Family in History: Interdisciplinary Essays, ed. Theodore K. Rabb and Robert I. Rotberg (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), pp. 85–88.

16. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 2 vols., ed. Phillips Bradley (New York: Vintage, 1945), 2:212.

17. Molly Tilghman and Abigail Adams quoted in Norton, Liberty’s Daughters, p. 75.

18. Sanderson, “Quantitative Aspects,” pp. 339–58.

19. Carl N. Degler, At Odds: Women and the Family in America from the Revolution to the Present (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1980), p. 196; Norman E. Himes, Medical History of Contraception (Baltimore: Williams & Wilkins, 1936); and Robert V. Wells, “Family Size and Fertility Control in Eighteenth-Century America: A Study of Qμaker Families,” Population Studies, 25 (1971), 75.

20. Kenneth A. Lockridge, Literacy in Colonial New England (New York: Norton, 1974); Maris A. Vinovskis, “Socioeconomic Determinants of Fertility,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 6 (Winter 1976), 375–96; Tamara K. Hareven and Maris A. Vinovskis, “Patterns of Childbearing in Late Nineteenth-Century America: The Determinants of Marital Fertility in Five Massachusetts Towns in 1880,” in Family and Population in Nineteenth Century America, ed. Tamara K. Hareven and Maris A. Vinovskis (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1978), pp. 85–125; and Wells, “Family Size and Fertility Control,” p. 76.

21. Perry Miller, The Life of the Mind in America (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1965), p. 128.

22. Marylynn Salmon, “Life, Liberty, and Dower: The Legal Status of Women After the American Revolution,” in Women, War, and Revolution, ed. Carol R. Berkin and Clara M. Lovett (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1980), p. 85.

23. St. George Tucker quoted in Kerber, Women of the Republic, p. 137; Tucker, ed., Blackstone’s Commentaries: With Notes of Reference, to the Constitution and Laws, of the Federal Government of the United States; and of the Commonwealth of Virginia, 5 vols. (Philadelphia: Wm. Birch and Abraham Small, 1803), 2:445.

24. Kerber, Women of the Republic, p. 140.

25. For an intriguing discussion of how changing inheritance laws may have eventually contributed to redefining the married woman’s status as an individual, see ibid., pp. 140–55.

26. Harriet Martineau is quoted in Joan Hoff Wilson, “The Illusion of Change: Women and the American Revolution,” in The American Revolution: Explorations in the History of American Radicalism, ed. Alfred F. Young (Dekalb: Northern Illinois Univ. Press, 1976), p. 419.

27. See Mary Beard, Woman as Force in History (New York: Macmillan, 1946). A similar view is supported by Richard B. Morris in Studies in the History of Early American Law (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1930); and Morris, ed., Select Cases of the Mayor’s Court of New York City (Washington, D.C.: American Historical Assoc., 1935), pp. 21–25. For a revisionist view, see Norma Basch, In the Eyes of the Law: Women, Marriage, and Property in Nineteenth-Century New York (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1982); Peggy Rabkin, “The Origins of Law Reform: The Social Significance of the Nineteenth-Century Codification Movement and Its Contribution to the Passage of the Early Married Woman’s Property Acts,” Buffalo Law Review, 24 (1974), 683–760; and Marylynn Salmon, “Life, Liberty, and Dower.” See also Salmon’s “Equality or Submersion? Feme Covert Status in Early Pennsylvania,” in Women of America: A History, ed. Carol Ruth Berkin and Mary Beth Norton (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979).

28. Basch, In the Eyes of the Law, pp. 17, 232.

29. Judge Hertell quoted in Cott, Bonds of Womanhood, p. 78.

30. See especially, Norton’s chapter, “As Independent as Circumstances Will Admit,” which begins, “If any quality was antithetical to the colonial notion of femininity, it was autonomy” (Liberty’s Daughters, p. 125).

31. Abigail Adams in a letter to John Adams, March 31, 1776, repr. in The Feminist Papers: From Adams to de Beauvoir, ed. Alice S. Rossi (New York: Bantam, 1973), pp. 10–11.

32. Grace Growden Galloway quoted in Norton, Liberty’s Daughters, p. 45.

33. Salmon, “Life, Liberty, and Dower,” p. 97; Nancy F. Cott, “Divorce and the Changing Status of Women in Eighteenth-Century Massachusetts,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 33 (October 1976), 586–614; Leonard Woods Labaree, ed. Royal Instructions to British Colonial Governors, 1670–1776, 2 vols. (New York: Appleton-Century, 1935), 1:155.

34. Gilbert Imlay, The Emigrants, & c., or The History of an Expatriated Family. 3 vols. (London: A. Hamilton, 1793), 1:ix.

35. Alice Morse Earle, Colonial Dames and Good Wives (1895; repr., New York: Frederick Ungar, 1962), pp. 247–53; Elizabeth F. Eilet, The Women of the American Revolution (New York: Scribner’s, 1853–54), passim; Wendy Martin, “Women and the American Revolution,” Early American Literature, 11 (1976–77), 322–35; and Norton, Liberty’s Daughters, pp. 195–227.

36. Sophie Drinker, “Votes for Women in Eighteenth-Century New Jersey,” New York Historical Society Proceedings, 31 (1962), 80. See also the Massachusetts Spy, or Worcester Gazette (November 1, 1797) under a “Rights of Women” headline: “At the late election in Elizabethtown [N.J.], the Females asserted the privilege granted them by the laws of that state, and gave in their votes for members to represent them in the state legislature” (p. 3).

37. “Lines, Written by a Lady, who was questioned respecting her inclination to marry,” Massachusetts Magazine, or Monthly Museum, 6 (September 1794), 566.

38. “Rights of Women, by a Lady,” Philadelphia Minerva, October 17, 1795.

39. Alexander Keyssar, “Widowhood in Eighteenth-Century Massachusetts: A Problem in the History of the Family,” Perspective in American History, 8 (1974), 83–119; Wells, “Family History,” pp. 11–12; and Wells, “Qpaker Marriage Patterns,” PP. 433–34.

40. Betsey Mayhew and Sarah Hanschurst quoted in Norton, Liberty’s Daughters, p. 241. And for hundreds of comments about the advantages of remaining unmarried and the “Cult of Single Blessedness,” see Lee Virginia Chambers-Schiller, Liberty, A Better Husband: Single Women in America: The Generations of 1780–1840 (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1984).

41. Charles Brockden Brown, Alcuin: A Dialogue, ed. Lee R. Edwards (New York: Grossman, 1971), pp. 88; 24–25.

42. Lyman H. Butterfield et al., eds., Adams Family Correspondence, 4 vols. (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1963–73), 1:87.

43. Jane Tompkins, Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790–1860 (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1985).

44. Catherine Maria Sedgwick, “Old Maids,” in Old Maids: Short Stories by Nineteenth-Century U.S. Women Writers, ed. Susan Koppelman (New York: Pandora, 1984).

45. Rachel M. Brownstein, Becoming a Heroine: Reading About Women in Novels (New York: Viking, 1982), p. 24.

46. The historiography of changing family patterns is controversial, and the picture tends to look different depending on what factors one includes. Class, regional, and racial factors all influence the interpretation in different ways. Degler, Kerber, and Norton, for example, all tend to see a changing family pattern with more options for women by the end of the eighteenth century, although Kerber, perhaps, views the situation less optimistically than the other historians. Lawrence Stone has charted a change in family structure in England during the eighteenth century, especially an increase in affectional marriages and affectional modes of child rearing. See his The Family, Sex, and Marriage in England, 1500–1800 (New York: Harper & Row, 1977). A similar pattern is described in the United States by Jay Fliegelman, Prodigals and Pilgrims: The American Revolution Against Patriarchal Authority, 1750–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1982); Daniel B. Smith, Inside the Great House: Planter Family Life in Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake Society (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1980); and Ronald G. Walters, “The Family and Ante-Bellum Reform: An Interpretation,” Societas, 3 (Summer 1973), 221–32. But Philip J. Greven, in The Protestant Temperament: Patterns of Child-Rearing, Religious Experience, and the Self in Early America (New York: Knopf, 1978), argues for different methods of child rearing occurring simultaneously rather than evolving. Michael Zuckerman, in “Penmanship Exercises for Saucy Sons: Some Thoughts on the Colonial Southern Family,” South Carolina History Review, 84 (1983), 152–66, finds family patterns changing in the South by the end of the eighteenth century, while Jan Lewis, in The Pursuit of Happiness: Family Values in Jefferson’s Virginia (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1983), finds change occurring more gradually and much later. For a brief overview of the different arguments, see Thomas P. Slaughter, “Family Politics in Revolutionary America,” American Quarterly, 36 (Fall 1984), 598–606. My own focus is not on how the family “actually” changed but how selected social commentators of the late eighteenth century presented dialectical views of the family and woman’s role in the family and society.

47. Cott, Bonds of Womanhood, p. 202.

48. David Lundberg and Henry F. May, “The Enlightened Reader in America,” American Quarterly, 28 (Summer 1976), 262–71; app. Lundberg and May conclude that 40 percent of all the booksellers and libraries in their sample made Emile available to the American reading public. See also Paul M. Spurlin, Rosseau in America, 1760–1809 (University: Univ. of Alabama Press, 1969).

49. Jean-Jacques Rosseau, Emilius and Sophia; or, A New System of Education, trans, by “A Citizen of Geneva” (London: T. Becket and R. Baldwin, 1783).

50. Boston Weekly Magazine, 2 (May 5, 1804), no; 2 (March 24, 1804), 36.

51. Helena Wells, Constantia Neville; or, The West Indian (London: C. Whittingham for T. Caddell, 1800).

52. S.S.B.K. Wood, Amelia; or, Influence of Virtue. An Old Man’s Story (Portsmouth, N.H.: William Treadwell, 1802), p. 103.

53. Helena Wells, The Step-Mother; a Domestic Tale, from Real Life, 2 vols. (London: T. N. Longman and O. Rees, 1799), 2:21–22.

54. S.S.B.K. Wood, Dorval, or the Speculator (Portsmouth, N.H.: Nutting and Whitelock, 1801), p. 78, and Julia, Illuminated Baron (Portsmouth, N.H.: Charles Peirce, 1800), pp. 81–82.

55. When published serially in the Massachusetts Magazine, or Monthly Museum from 1792 to 1794, Murray’s Gleaner essays were signed with a male pseudonym, “Mentor.” Reprinted in three volumes in Boston in 1798, however, they were signed Constantia, and earlier references suggest that, even before the collected edition, readers were aware that the Gleaner was a woman.

56. Judith Sargent Murray, The Gleaner: A Miscellaneous Production. In Three Volumes. By Constantia (Boston: I. Thomas and E. T. Andrews, 1798), 1:167–68, 3:220.

57. “On the Equality of the Sexes,” Massachusetts Magazine, or Monthly Museum, 2 (March 1798), 132.

58. Murray, The Gleaner, 3:189.

59. For the British connection, see Dale Spender’s indispensable Women of Ideas (And What Men Have Done to Suppress Them) (London: Ark, 1982). For a discussion of the most prominent of the American feminists of the time, see Mary Sumner Benson, Women in Eighteenth-Century America (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1935); and Wilson, “The Illusion of Change,” pp. 386–93, 426–31. The “Female Advocate” became a subject of some controversy in the magazines of the time owing to an anonymous pamphlet published in New Haven, Conn., in 1801 called, simply, The Female Advocate. This pamphlet especially emphasized the importance of a thorough female education and suggested, whimsically, that the doors of all institutions of higher learning be shut to men and opened to women for a period of time and then it be seen just which was the smarter sex. See also Eliza Southgate Bowne, A Girl’s Life Eighty Years Ago (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1887).

60. See Charles Louis de Secondât, baron de Montesquieu, The Spirit of Laws (1748; repr., Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1977); and Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas Caritat, marquis de Condorcet, Outline of an Historical View of the Progress of the Human Mind (Philadelphia: Mathew Carey, 1796), esp. pp. 24–50. Condorcet’s arguments on behalf of women are alluded to in Charles Brockden Brown’s Alcuin. For a detailed discussion of Brown’s feminist dialogue, see my essay, “The Matter and Manner of Charles Brockden Brown’s Alcuin,” in Critical Essays on Charles Brockden Brown, ed. Bernard Rosenthal (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1981), pp. 71–86.

61. James Butler, Fortune’s Foot-ball; or, The Adventures of Mercutio. Founded on Matters of Fact…, 2 vols, in 1 (Harrisburgh, Pa.: John Wyeth, 1797), 1:145–46. (The title page indicates this novel was printed in 1797, although copyright was not secured until 1798.)

62. Imlay, The Emigrants, pp. ii, 22–23, 66.

63. Sukey Vickery, Emily Hamilton, a Novel. Founded on Incidents in Real Life. By a Young Lady of Worcester County (Worcester, Mass.: Isaiah Thomas, Jr., 1803), pp. 97–98, 108.

64. Three essays perceptively discuss the American reaction to Wollstonecraft and Wollstonecraftism. See R. M. Janes, “On the Reception of Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 39 (April–June 1978), 293–302; Patricia Jewell McAlexander, “The Creation of the American Eve: The Cultural Dialogue on the Nature and Role of Women in Late-Eighteenth-Century America,” Early American Literature, 9 (1975), 252–66; and Marcelle Thiebaux, “Mary Wollstonecraft in Federalist America: 1791–1802,” in The Evidence of the Imagination: Studies of Interactions Between Life and Art in English Romantic Literature, ed. Donald H. Reiman et al. (New York: New York Univ. Press, 1978), pp. 195–245.

65. Lundberg and May, “Enlightened Reader,” app.

66. New England Palladium, 19 (March 2, 1802), 1.

67. For a fuller discussion, see also Linda K. Kerber, “Daughters of Columbia: Educating Women for the Republic, 1787–1805,” in The Hofstadter Aegis: A Memorial, ed. Eric L. McKitrick and Stanley M. Elkins (New York: Knopf, 1974), pp. 36–59. It must be emphasized that Godwin did not expect the Memoirs to in any way cast his deceased wife in a negative light. Utterly bereft at her death, Godwin moved his books and papers into her study and, until his own death forty years later, continued to work in Mary’s room, among her belongings, beneath the magnificent portrait of her by John Opie. For an excellent discussion of the relationship between Godwin and Wollstonecraft and a sampling of early reviews of the Memoirs (including those quoted here), see Peter H. Marshall, William Godwin (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1984), pp. 189–94.

68. Samuel Miller, “The Appropriate Duty and Ornament of the Female Sex,” in The Columbian Preacher; or, A Collection of Original Sermons, from Preachers of Eminence in the United States. Embracing the Distinguishing Doctrines of Grace (Catskill: Nathan Elliott, 1808), p. 253.

69. For an extended critique of Wollstonecraft’s life and her ideas, see Benjamin Silliman, Letters of Shahcoolen, a Hindu Philosopher, Residing in Philadelphia … (Boston: Russell & Cutler, 1802), 29–32, 48. Two other novels denounced Wollstonecraft in the years immediately following the publication of the Memoirs, Wells’s Constantia Neville and Wood’s Dorval.

70. The complex and heated debate over the limits of possibilities of domesticity in the nineteenth century is outside the focus of the present study. For a survey of the basic positions, however, the reader should consult the conclusion (pp. 197–206) of Nancy F. Cott’s Bonds of Womanhood.

71. Ruth H. Block, “American Feminine Ideals in Transition: The Rise of the Moral Mother, 1785–1815,” Feminist Studies, 4 (1978), 101–26. See also Mary Maples Dunn, “Saints and Sisters: Congregational and Quaker Women in the Early Colonial Period,” in Women in American Religion, ed. Janet Wilson James (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1980), pp. 30–35; Linda K. Kerber, “Can a Woman Be an Individual? The Limits of Puritan Tradition in the Early Republic,” Texas Studies in Language and Literature, 25 (Spring 1983), esp. 161–65; Anne L. Kuhn, The Mother’s Role in Childhood Education: New England Concepts, 1830–1860 (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1947); Gerald Moran and Maris Vinovskis, “The Puritan Family and Religion: A Critical Reappraisal,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 39 (January 1982), 29–63; and Peter Gregg Slater, Children in the New England Mind: In Death and In Life (Hamden, Conn.: Shoe String Press, 1977), esp. chaps. 3, 4.

72. William Lyman, A Virtuous Woman, the Bond of Domestic Union and the Source of Domestic Happiness (New London, Conn.: S. Green, 1802), pp. 22–23.

73. Parents’ Magazine (October 1840).

74. Helen Waite Papashivly, All the Happy Endings (New York: Harper, 1956), pp. 31–32.

75. There were, of course, exceptions to this rule, such as Cigarette, an adventurous young woman who finds her way through several complicated adventures. See Russel B. Nye, “The Novel as Dream and Weapon: Women’s Popular Novels in the Nineteenth Century,” Historical Society of Michigan Chronicle, 11 (4th qr. 1975), 2–18.

76. Charles Brockden Brown, “Female Learning,” Literary Magazine and American Register, 1 (January 1804), 245.

77. Samuel Reif, Infidelity, or the Victims of Sentiment (Philadelphia: W. W. Woodward, 1797), title page, pp. 36–37.

78. By viewing Montraville as the stock seducer and overlooking the problematic role played by Belcour, William C. Spengemann, in The Adventurous Muse: The Poetics of American Fiction, 1789–1900 (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1977), can dismiss Charlotte as possibly “the most rigidly programmatic sentimental novel ever written” (p. 92). But he also concedes that “certain fictive energies seem to be at work, threatening to compromise the conservative values” of this novel (p. 90).

79. For an excellent assessment of Rowson’s feminism and a discussion of her fictional strengths and weaknesses, see Patricia L. Parker’s Susanna Haswell Rowson (Boston: Twayne, 1986). I am grateful to Professor Parker for making her manuscript available to me. See also, Eve Kornfeld, “Women in Post-Revolutionary American Culture: Susanna Haswell Rowson’s American Career, 1792–1824,” Journal of American Culture, 6 (Winter 1983), 56–62; Wendy Martin, “Profile: Susanna Rowson, Early American Novelist,” Women’s Studies, 2 (1974), 1–8; and Dorothy Weil, In Defense of Women: Susanna Rowson (University Park: Pennsylvania State Univ. Press, 1976), esp. pp. 31–64. The quotations are from the paperback edition of the novel “edited for modern readers” by Clara M. Kirk and Rudolf Kirk (New Haven: College & University Press, 1964), p. 121. Although this is the only readily available edition of the novel, it must be emphasized that it is neither a reprint of the original edition nor a scholarly modern edition of the work.

80. Critical Review (London) for April 1791, repr. in Rowson’s Charlotte (Philadelphia: Mathew Carey, 1794), n.p. For other sympathetic critical assessments, see the Boston Weekly Magazine, ι (January 22, 1803), 53; and Samuel L. Knapp’s “Memoir,” in Rowson’s posthumously published Charlotte’s Daughter; or, The Three Orphans. A Sequel to Charlotte Temple … (Boston: Richardson & Lord, 1828). pp. 3–20.

81. Herbert Ross Brown, The Sentimental Novel in America, 1789–1860 (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1940), p. 176.

82. Margaretta; or, The Intricacies of the Heart (Philadelphia: Samuel F. Bradford, 1807), p. 80. The anonymous author of this novel well may be alluding to Judith Sargent Murray’s earlier “Story of Margaretta.” Both on the level of plot and characterization there are definite similarities between the two works.

83. See Leslie A. Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel, rev. ed. (1960; repr., New York: Dell, 1966), p. 93, and Walter P. Wenska, Jr., “The Coquette and the American Dream of Freedom,” Early American Literature, 12 (1977–78), 243–55.

84. The documents pertaining to Elizabeth Whitman’s life and death (right down to an inventory of all she had with her at Bell Tavern when she died) have been included in Charles Knowles Bolton, The Elizabeth Whitman Mystery (Peabody, Mass.: Peabody Historical Society, 1912); Herbert Ross Brown, introduction to The Coquette (New York: Facsimile Text Society, 1939), pp. v–xix; Caroline W. Dall, The Romance of the Association; or, One Last Glimpse of Charlotte Temple and Eliza Wharton (Cambridge, Mass.: Press of John Wilson, 1875); and Jane E. Locke, “Historical Preface, Including a Memoir of the Author” in The Coquette (Boston: Samuel Etheridge for E. Larkin, 1855), pp. 3–30. The article quoted from the Salem Mercury for July 29, 1788, is reprinted in Bolton, pp. 33–37.

85. Anonymous essayist quoted in Bolton, Elizabeth Whitman Mystery, p. 59.

86. Almost all discussions of The Coquette sooner or later raise the question of the real identity of Major Sanford. See Bolton, Elizabeth Whitman Mystery, pp. 109–32, for a summary of the early choices; and Alexander Cowie, The Rise of the American Novel (New York: American Book Co., 1948), p. 16; Dall, Romance of the Association, pp. 101–15; and James Woodress, A Yankee’s Odyssey: The Life of Joel Barlow (New York: Lippincott, 1958), pp. 60–64.

87. Quoted in Herbert Ross Brown’s introduction to The Coquette, p. xii.

88. Despite its being generally acknowledged as the best of the early American sentimental novels, The Coquette has never been published in a modern edition using modern standards of textual accuracy. The only widely available edition of The Coquette is that edited by William S. Osborne with punctuation and spellings silently (and not always carefully) “edited for the modern reader.” But because it is available in paperback, I have taken all my references from this edition (New Haven: College & University Press, 1970), and hereafter references to this edition will be cited parenthetically within the text. Lillie Deming Loshe, The Early American Novel, 1789–1830 (1907; repr., New York; Frederick Ungar, 1966), was one of the first critics to note that The Coquette “is superior to its predecessors in interest and especially in character-drawing” (p. 14).

89. Sanford does, however, allude to Laurence Sterne in the letter in which he announces his triumph over Eliza—a fitting allusion considering Foster’s comments about Sterne in The Boarding School; or, Lessons of a Perceptress to Her Pupils (Boston: Isaiah Thomas and E. T. Andrews, 1798), warning her readers against the “licentious wit” that is “concealed under the artful blandishments of sympathetic sensibility” in Sterne’s fiction (p. 205).

90. Bolton, Elizabeth Whitman Mystery, pp. 39–41.

91. Ibid., pp. 59–60.

92. I have elsewhere assessed at length the inadequacy of the choices presented to Eliza. See my article “Flirting with Destiny: Ambivalence and Form in the Early American Sentimental Novel,” Studies in American Fiction, 10 (Spring 1982), esp. 27–34.

93. Joanna Russ, “What Can a Heroine Do? Or Why Women Can’t Write,” in Images of Women in Fiction: Feminist Perspectives, ed. Susan Koppelman Cornillon (Bowling Green: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1972), p. 13.

94. Ibid., pp. 12–13.

95. Jane E. Locke, “Historical Preface,” to her edition of The Coquette, pp. 3–30. The novel was dramatized by J. Horatio Nichols, The New England Coquette: From the History of The Celebrated Eliza Wharton. A Tragic Drama, in Three Acts (Salem: N. Coverly, 1802).

96. Herbert Ross Brown, “Introduction,” The Coquette, p. ix.

97. Locke, “Historical Preface,” p. 4.

Chapter 7

1. John Cosens Ogden, The Female Guide (Concord, N.H.: George Hough, 1793), p. 26.

2. Thomas Paine quoted by John Fiske, The Critical Period in American History, 1783–1789 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1888), pp. 55–56.

3. Thomas Jefferson, Writings, ed. Merrill D. Peterson (New York: Library of America, 1984), p. 70.

4. For different analyses of Revolutionary and postrevolutionary crowd actions, see Dirk Hoerder, Crowd Action in Revolutionary Massachusetts, 1765–1780 (New York: Academic, 1977); Pauline Maier, “Popular Uprisings and Civil Authority in Eighteenth-Century America,” in Colonial America: Essays in Politics and Social Development, ed. Stanley N. Katz (Boston: Little, Brown, 1976), pp. 432–452, and From Resistance to Revolution: Colonial Radicals and the Development of American Opposition to Britain, 1756–1776 (New York: Knopf, 1972); Peter Shaw, American Patriots and the Rituals of Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1980); and Alfred F. Young, “English Plebeian Culture and Eighteenth-Century American Radicalism,” in The Origins of Anglo-American Radicalism (London: Allen & Unwin, 1984).

5. For a discussion of the aristocratic assumptions about the necessity for enlightened leadership, see Bernard Bailyn, Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1967). For a somewhat different focus, see Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1969), and “The Democratization of Mind in the American Revolution,” in The Moral Foundations of the American Republic, 2nd ed., ed. Robert H. Horwitz (Charlottesville: Univ. Press of Virginia, 1979), pp. 102–28.

6. The denunciations by the Anti-Federalists, as well as Hamilton’s opposing views, are quoted in Alfred F. Young, The Democratic Republicans of New York: The Origins, 7763–1797 (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1967), pp. 141–42, 58. (Young also elucidates the differences and similarities between the Anti-Federalists and the Republicans.) The final summary of each party’s attacks on the other is from Ronald P. Formisano, The Transformation of Political Culture: Massachusetts Parties, 1790s–1840s (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1983), p. 108. My chapter is indebted to these two excellent studies. I also wish to note the influence of older Progressive histories, preeminently Carl L. Becker’s The History of Political Parties in the Province of New York, 1760–1776 (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1909), as well as more recent studies that have somewhat qualified the Progressive position (not all Democratic-Republicans were from the middling classes, nor all Federalists of the aristocracy). See, especially, Milton M. Klein, “Democracy and Politics in Colonial New York,” New York History, 40 (1959), 221–46; Jackson Turner Main, “Social Origins of a Political Elite: The Upper House in the Revolutionary Era,” Huntington Library Quarterly, 27 (1964), 155; and Main, “Government by the People: The American Revolution and the Democratization of the Legislatures,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 23 (July 1966), 391–407. For a sampling of the documents of Anti-Federalism, see Herbert J. Storing, ed., The Anti-Federalist (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1984).

7. Hugh Henry Brackenridge, Modern Chivalry, ed. Claude M. Newlin (New York: American Book Co., 1937), pp. 13–17. Hereafter references to this edition will be cited parenthetically within the text.

8. “To All Good People in the State of Rhode Island,” n.d., Broadsides Collection, AAS. For a fuller discussion of Federalist apprehensions, see David Hackett Fischer, The Revolution of American Conservatism: The Federalist Party in the Era of Jeffersonian Democracy (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1965), p. 204. See also Robert H. Wiebe, The Opening of American Society: From the Adoption of the Constitution to the Eve of Disunion (New York: Knopf, 1984).

9. George Washington quoted in Richard B. Morris, “The Confederation Period and the American Historian,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 13 (April 1956), 139–40.

10. George Washington to James Madison, November 5, 1786, in The Writings of George Washington from the Original Manuscript Sources, ed. John C. Fitzpatrick, 39 vols. (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1931–44), 39:51–52. For a fascinating discussion of Washington’s own view of his role in the Republic (and, concomitantly, his view of the Republic), see Garry Wills, Cincinnatus: George Washington and the Enlightenment: Images of Power in Early America (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1984).

11. Alexander Hamilton quoted in Bernard Bailyn et al., The Great Republic (Boston: Little, Brown, 1977), pp. 322, 342.

12. Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788–1850 (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1984), p. 26. For prerevolutionary figures, see Gary B. Nash, The Urban Crucible: Social Change, Political Consciousness, and the Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1979), esp. pp. 125–27, 186–89, 253–56 325–27. For an overview, see Edward Pessen, Riches, Class, and Power Before the Civil War (Lexington, Mass.: D.C. Heath, 1973).

13. For further discussion, see Carl Bridenbaugh, Cities in Revolt: Urban Life in America, 1743–1776 (New York: Knopf, 1955), esp. pp. 79, 140, 152, 281, 288; Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1970), pp. 23–26, 28–29, 231–232; Susan E. Hirsch, Roots of the American Working Class: The Industrialization of Crafts in Newark, 1800–1860 (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1978); Michael B. Katz, Poverty and Policy in American History (New York: Academic, 1983), pp. 1–16, 175–76; David Montgomery, “The Working Classes of the Pre-Industrial American City, 1780–1830,” Labor History, 9 (Winter 1968), 3–22; Charles S. Olton, Artisans for Independence: Philadelphia Mechanics and the American Revolution (Syracuse: Syracuse Univ. Press, 1975), pp. 19–32; Howard R. Rock, Artisans of the New Republic: The Tradesmen of New York City in the Age of Jefferson (New York: New York Univ. Press, 1979), pp. 79, 155, 257, 265–268; and Charles G. Steffen, The Mechanics of Baltimore: Workers and Politics in the Age of Revolution, 1763–1812 (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1984), pp. 15–16, 45–47.

14. For a discussion of rural poverty, see Freeman H. Hart, The Valley of Virginia in the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1942); James A. Henretta, The Evolution of American Society, 1700–1815: An Interdisciplinary Analysis (Lexington, Mass: D. C. Heath, 1973); Barbara Karsky, “Agrarian Radicalism in the Late Revolutionary Period,” in New Wine in Old Skins, ed. Erich Angermann (Stuttgart: Klett, 1976).

15. Richard B. Morris, “Insurrection in Massachusetts,” in America in Crisis, ed. Daniel Aaron (New York: Knopf, 1952); and Morris, “The Confederation Period,” p. 142.

16. Mercy Otis Warren is quoted in Robert Allen Rutland, The Ordeal of the Constitution: The Anti-Federalists and the Ratification Struggle of 1787–1788 (Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1966), pp. 41–43. For a sympathetic discussion of John Adams’s Defense of the Constitutions…, see Peter Shaw, The Character of John Adams (New York: Norton, 1976), pp. 207–23.

17. Robert Ferguson, “Ideology and Myth in the Framing of the Constitution,” paper presented at the Modern Language Association, Chicago, December 1985. See also Charles A. Beard, An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States (New York: Macmillan, 1935); and Alfred A. Kelly and Winfred A. Harbison, The American Constitution: Its Origins and Development (New York: Norton, 1976).

18. Young, Democratic Republicans, pp. 568, 575–76. See also Formisano, Transformation of Political Culture, pp. 149–68, for an analysis of the relationships between class and party affiliation.

19. These representative Republican remarks are quoted in Young, Democratic Republicans, pp. 81, 568, 580–81, 21–22, 579. See also Benjamin Fletcher Wright, Jr., A Source Book of American Political Theory (New York: Macmillan, 1929).

20. Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49 (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1966).

21. William Cobbett quoted in Wilentz, Chants Democratic, pp. 68–69.

22. All quoted in Morris, “The Confederation Period,” pp. 142–43.

23. These terms (the keystones of republicanism) are analyzed by J.G.A. Pocock in “Virtue and Commerce in the Eighteenth Century,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 3 (Summer 1972), 119–34, and The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1975); they are amplified by Wilentz, Chants Democratic, p. 14. For a different analysis of republicanism, see Joyce Appleby, Capitalism and a New Social Order: The Republican Vision of the 1790s (New York: New York Univ. Press, 1984).

24. Wood, “Democratization,” pp. 105, no. See also Wilbur Samuel Howell, Eighteenth-Century British Logic and Rhetoric (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1971); and Warren Guthrie, “The Development of Rhetorical Theory in America, 1635–1850,” Speech Monographs, 13 (1946), 14–22.

25. James Madison quoted in Wood, “Democratization,” pp. 115, 122.

26. Merle Curti, The Growth of American Thought, 3rd ed. (New York: Harper & Row, 1964), p. 209; and Frank Luther Mott, American Journalism: A History, 1690–1960 (New York: Macmillan, 1962), p. 167.

27. Wood, “Democratization,” pp. 120–21. For a breakdown of early American newspapers by party affiliation, see Fischer, Revolution of American Conservatism, pp. 413–23. Although I am quoting here from the New York Commercial Advertiser for July il, 1800, this kind of virulent anti-Jefferson propaganda was commonplace both in the Advertiser and in numerous other Federalist papers, especially the Gazette of the United States and the Connecticut Courant.

28. The Alien and Sedition Laws, ratified on July 14, 1798, are quoted in full in James Morton Smith’s excellent study, Freedom’s Fetters: The Alien and Sedition Laws and American Civil Liberties (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1956), pp. 441–42. My discussion of these laws is indebted to Smith’s study and, to a lesser extent, to John C. Miller, Crisis in Freedom: The Alien and Sedition Acts (Boston: Little, Brown, 1951).

29. Wood presents both sides of the debate in “Democratization,” p. 122. It must be added that Jefferson later questioned his earlier optimistic view of public opinion and noted that “nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle.” Jefferson is quoted in Miller, Crisis in Freedom, p. 231.

30. The Gazette of the United States, the Boston Centinel, the Connecticut Courant, and the New York Gazette are quoted in Smith, Freedom’s Fetters, on, respectively, pp. 15, 178, 179, 180.

31. Smith, in Freedom’s Fetters, quotes John Adams’s prayer (p. 181) and Thomas Jefferson’s first inaugural address (pp. 432–33) and discusses Secretary of State Timothy Pickering’s extraordinary measures to suppress Republican politicians and newspapers (pp. 182–87).

32. Leon Howard, “The Late Eighteenth Century: An Age of Contradictions,” in Transitions in American Literary History, ed. Harry Hayden Clark (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1953), pp. 51–89. See also William L. Hedges, “Charles Brockden Brown and the Culture of Contradictions,” Early American Literature, 9 (Fall 1974), 107–42.

33. Walter L. Reed, An Exemplary History of the Novel: The Quixotic Versus the Picaresque (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 60.

34. James Butler, Fortune’s Foot-ball; or, The Adventures of Mercutio, 2 vols, in 1 (Harrisburgh, Pa.: John Wyeth, 1797), 1:72, 2:184, preface. See also Henri Petter, The Early American Novel (Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press, 1971), pp. 281–301, for a fine discussion of the picaresque cosmology.

35. Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel (1957; repr., Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1967), pp. 83, 65.

36. Of the myriad analyses of the self-consuming nature of capitalist society, one of the most lucid and eloquent is George Lukács’s Marxism and Human Liberation, ed. and trans. E. San Juan, Jr. (New York: Dell, 1973). See also Lukács’s The Theory of the Novel, trans. Anna Bostock (Cambridge: MIT Press), esp. pp. 70–93.

37. Butler, Fortune’s Foot-ball, 1:46–47; see also, 2:140, 2:191.

38. Watt, Rise of the Novel, pp. 67–70; and Max Weber, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. and trans. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1946), esp. pp. 349–50. Lillie Deming Loshe, The Early American Novel, 1789–1830 (1907; repr., New York: Frederick Ungar, 1966), p. 24, notes the way in which Mercutio seems little perturbed by the demise of the women he professes to love.

39. Petter, Early American Novel, p. 29.

40. The Adventures of Jonathan Corncob, Loyal American Refugee, Written by Himself (London: Printed for the author, 1787), p. 164.

41. Umberto Eco, “Narrative Structures in Fleming,” in The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1976), pp. 145–72.

42. Although originally published posthumously and in bowdlerized form, Mr. Penrose: The Journal of Penrose, Seaman has recently been republished with an excellent introduction and notes by David Howard Dickason (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1969).

43. Janice A. Radway, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1984), esp. pp. 194–96.

44. The two editions of The History of Constantius and Pulchera that include advertisements are Norwich, Conn.: Thomas Hubbard for Simon Carew, 1796, and Portsmouth, N.H.: Charles Peirce, 1797.

45. For discussions of travel writing, see, for example, Percy G. Adams, Travelers and Travel Liars, 1660–1800 (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1962); Robert C. Bredeson, “Landscape Description in Nineteenth-Century American Travel Literature,” American Quarterly, 20 (Spring 1968), 86–94; Percy G. Butler, Travel Literature and the Evolution of the Novel (Lexington: Univ. Press of Kentucky, 1984); Jane Donahue, “Colonial Shipwreck Narratives: A Theological Study,” Books at Brown, 23 (1969), 101–34; R.W Frantz, The English Traveller and the Movement of Ideas, 1660–1732 (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1932); G. B. Parks, “Travel as Education,” in The Seventeenth Century, ed. R. F. Jones et al. (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1951); G. B. Parks “The Turn to the Romantic in Travel Literature of the Eighteenth Century,” Modern Language Quarterly, 25 (1964), 22–23; and William C. Spengemann, The Adventurous Muse: The Poetics of American Fiction, 1789–1900 (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1977), esp. pp. 6–118.

46. Special thanks to John Seelye for bringing Elkanah Watson’s delightful Sternean travel “novel” to my attention.

47. Mr. Penrose, pp. 358–59.

48. Royall Tyler, The Algerine Captive, ed. Don L. Cook (New Haven: College & University Press, 1970), p. 224. Hereafter references to this readily available edition of the novel will be cited parenthetically within the text.

49. Lucien Goldman, Towards a Sociology of the Novel, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Tavistock, 1975), esp. pp. 1–18.

50. Robert Hemenway, “Fiction in the Age of Jefferson: The Early American Novel as Intellectual Document,” Midcontinent American Studies Journal, 9 (1968), 91–102; and Emory Elliott, Revolutionary Writers: Literature and Authority in the New Republic, 1725–1810 (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1982), pp. 191–93.

51. Claude M. Newlin, The Life and Writings of Hugh Henry Brackenridge (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1932), pp. 112–92.

52. James Kelleher, “Hugh Henry Brackenridge,” in American Writers of the Early Republic, vol. 37 (Dictionary of Literary Biography), ed. Emory Elliott (Detroit: Gale, 1985), P. 53.

53. Newlin, Life and Writings of… Brackenridge, p. 148; and Hugh Henry Brackenridge, Incidents of the Insurrection in the Western Parts of Pennsylvania, in the Year 1794, 3 vols. (Philadelphia: John McCulloch, 1795), 1:54–55.

54. Newlin, Life and Writings of… Brackenridge, pp. 171, 173.

55. Ibid., pp. 205, 208; Pittsburgh Gazette, October 5, 1799.

56. Kelleher, “Hugh Henry Brackenridge,” p. 56.

57. For a fine discussion of republican rhetoric and the novel, see Michael T. Gilmore, “Eighteen-Century Oppositional Ideology and Hugh Henry Brackenridge’s Modern Chivalry,” Early American Literature, 13 (Fall 1978), 181–92. Also see, C. Peter Magrath, Yazoo: Law and Politics in the New Republic (Providence: Brown Univ. Press, 1966).

58. For a sampling of opinion on Modern Chivalry, see Sargent Bush, Jr., “Modern Chivalry and Young’s Magazine,” American Literature, 44 (May 1972), 292–99; Joseph H. Harkey, “The Don Quixote of the Frontier: Brackenridge’s Modern Chivalry,” Early American Literature, 8 (Fall 1973), 193–203; W. W. Hoffa, “Language of Rogues and Fools in Brackenridge’s Modern Chivalry,” Studies in the Novel, 12 (1980), 289–300; Wendy Martin, “On the Road with the Philosopher and the Profiteer: A Study of Hugh Henry Brackenridge’s Modern Chivalry,” Eighteenth-Century Studies, 4 (1971), 241–56, and “The Rogue and the Rational Man: Hugh Henry Brackenridge’s Study of a Con Man in Modern Chivalry,” Early American Literature, 8 (Fall 1973), 179–92; Charles E. Modlin, “The Folly of Ambition in Modern Chivalry,” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society, 85 (1975), 310–13; William L. Nance, “Satiric Elements in Brackenridge’s Modern Chivalry,” Texas Studies in Language and Literature, 9 (Autumn 1967), 381–89; and Amberys R. Whittle, “Modern Chivalry: The Frontier as Crucible,” Early American Literature, 6 (Spring 1971), 263–70.

59. Peter, Early American Novel, p. 381, notes rightly that Mann’s exploitation of Sampson’s sexual identity is analogous to the Richardsonian prurience over a woman’s virginity.

60. The Female Review; or, Memoirs of an American Young Lady (Dedham, Mass.: Nathaniel & Benjamin Heaton, 1797), frontmatter.

61. Percy H. Boynton, Literature and American Life (Boston: Ginn, 1936), pp. 195–96; Alexander Cowie, The Rise of the American Novel (New York: American Book Co., 1948), p. 30; and Petter, Early American Novel, p. 290. Special thanks to Jack B. Moore for sending me a copy of his then unpublished essay, “Our Literary Heritage: A Justly Neglected Masterpiece,” which documents the magazine publishing history of this bizarre novel.

62. Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (New York: Basic Books, 1984), p. 242.

63. The History of Constantius and Pulchera; or, Constancy Rewarded; An American Novel (Boston: [n.p.], 1794), p. 1. Hereafter references to this edition will be made parenthetically within the text.

64. Loshe, Early American Novel, calls Constantius and Pulchera a “cheerful and animated tale” with a “cheerful conglomeration of improbabilities” (p. 64).

65. Charlotte Lennox, The Female Quixote (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1970), P. 138.

66. Tabitha Tenney, Female Quixotism: Exhibited in the Romantic Opinions and Extravagant Adventures of Dorcasina Sheldon, 2 vols. (Boston: I. Thomas and E. T. Andrews, 1801), 2:201. Hereafter references to this edition of the novel will be cited parenthetically within the text.

67. Reed, Exemplary History, pp. 74–75.

68. Laurie Langbauer, “Romance Revisited: Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote,” Novel, 18 (1984), 39. The Fielding review was recently republished in Henry Fielding, “The Covent Garden Journal, No. 24, March 24, 1752,” in The Criticism of Henry Fielding, ed. Ian Williams (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970), p. 193. For a fuller discussion of Lennox, see also Gustavus Howard Maynadier, The First American Novelist? (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1940); and Philippe Sejourne, The Mystery of Charlotte Lennox: First Novelist of Colonial America (Aix-en-Provence: Publications des Annales de la Faculté des lettres, 1967). And, for a comparison of Lennox and Tenney, see Sally Allen McNall, Who Is in the House? A Psychological Study of Two Centuries of Women’s Fiction in America, 1795 to the Present (New York: Elsevier, 1981), esp. pp. 15–18.

69. Charles H. Bell, History of [the Town of] Exeter, New Hampshire (1888; repr., Bowie, Md.: Catholic Heritage, 1979), pp. 382–84; Arthur Gilman, The Gilman Family (Albany, N.Y.: Joel Munsell, 1869), pp. 97–98; and Mary Jane Tenney, The Tenney Family, or the Descendants of Thomas Tenney of Rowley, Massachusetts, 1638–1890 (Boston: American Printing and Engraving Co., 1891), p. 57. The letter from Tabitha Gilman Tenney to the Honorable William Plumer (October 25, 1823) is reprinted courtesy of the Plumer Papers, New Hampshire Historical Society, Concord. My special thanks to Dr. Sally Hoople for sending me a photocopy of this letter.

70. Elizabeth Dow Leonard, A Few Reminiscences of My Exeter Life, ed. Edward C. Echols (Exeter, N.H.: 2 × 4 Press, 1972), pp. 46–48. Leonard also relates an amusing anecdote about how, when Washington’s death was announced in Exeter, “many ladies thought it was necessary to faint, Mrs. Tenney among the number. She had a valuable mirror in her hand when she received the terrible news of [Washington’s] fate. She walked leisurely across the room, laid the mirror safely down, placed herself in a proper attitude … and then fainted away” (p. 48). Certainly this anecdote corroborates the rather sober, sensible Tabby Gilman portrayed by Patty Rogers in her diary. Sally Hoople, in her fine doctoral dissertation, “Tabitha Tenney: ‘Female Qpixotism’ ” (Fordham Univ., 1984, p. 291), also quotes from one other source, a letter in the Duyckinck Collection, Manuscripts and Archives Division of the New York Public Library, which notes that Tenney was “perhaps more remarkable for her domestic qualifications than for her literary performances,” another sad commentary on one of the best of the early novelists.

71. Diary of Patty Rogers, Manuscript Department, AAS. See especially the entries for 1785 on January 9 and 10, May 29, June 20, August 1, 2, and 4, and September 14 and 21.

72. Hoople, Tabitha Tenney, p. 112.

73. G. Thomas Tanselle, Roy all Tyler (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1967), and “Author and Publisher in 1800: Letters of Royall Tyler and Joseph Nancrede,” Harvard Library Bulletin, 15 (1967), 120–39. See also, Ada Lou Carson and Herbert L. Carson, Royall Tyler (Boston: Twayne, 1979). For a firsthand account of Tyler’s family, see the memoirs by his wife, Grandmother Tyler’s Book: The Recollections of Mary Palmer Tyler, ed. Helen Tyler Brown and Frederick Tupper (New York: G. P. Putnam’s, 1925), and by his son, Thomas Pickman Tyler, “Royall Tyler,” Proceedings of the Vermont Bar Association, 1 (1878–81), 44–62. George Floyd Newbrough has also published selections from Mary Tyler’s day-to-day journal in “Mary Tyler’s Journal,” Vermont Quarterly, 20 (1952), 19–31. For the less well-known works by Tyler, see Marius B. Péladeau, The Prose of Royall Tyler (Montpelier and Rutland: Vermont Historical Society/Tuttle, 1972), and The Verse of Royall Tyler (Charlottesville: Univ. Press of Virginia, 1968). See also Four Plays by Royall Tyler, ed. Arthur Wallace Peach and George Floyd Newbrough (1941; repr., Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1965), vol. 15 bd. with vol. 16 (ser. title, America’s Lost Plays, 20 vols.), and The Bay Boy, or Autobiography of a Youth of Massachusetts Bay. Sketches from an Unpublished Eighteenth-Century Novel, ed. Martha R. Wright (Hicksville, N.Y.: Exposition, 1978). The two contemporary editions of The Algerine Captive are Jack B. Moore’s reproduction of the 1802 London edition (Gainesville: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1967) and Don L. Cook’s paperback edition (see n. 48) based on the first Walpole edition of 1797 and “edited for the modern reader” (meaning that the editor has silently changed spelling, punctuation, and sometimes even phrasing from the original). It must also be noted that despite the plethora of Tyler documents problems remain. Tanselle, in a review of The Prose of Roy all Tyler (American Literature, 41 [March 1969], 117–19) as well as in his review essay “The Editing of Royall Tyler” (Early American Literature, 9 [Spring 1974], 83–95), has pointed out many of the textual problems with the contemporary editions of Tyler’s work, including The Algerine Captive, which, “though available in a photographic reproduction, has never been properly edited; and that reproduction… is of the wrong edition to be of most scholarly usefulness” (Early American Literature, 9:93). For a list of “substantive variants” in the British and American editions, see Tanselle, “Early American Fiction in England: The Case of The Algerine Captive,” Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 59 (1965), 367–84.

74. See Mary Tyler’s Journal, box 45, Royall Tyler Collection, Vermont Historical Society, Montpelier; Newbrough, ed., “Mary Tyler’s Journal,” pp. 19–33; and Brown and Tupper, eds., Grandmother Tyler’s Book, esp. pp. 76, 320.

75. Tanselle, Royall Tyler, pp. 19–23, provides an excellent account of Tyler’s role in the rebellion.

76. Brown and Tupper, eds., Grandmother Tyler’s Book, pp. 104–05.

77. Thomas P. Tyler, “Royall Tyler,” pp. 47–48. For a fuller discussion, see the full-length version of the memoir by Tyler’s son, Royall Tyler Collection, Vermont Historical Society, Montpelier.

78. Royall Tyler quoted in Tanselle, Roy all Tyler, p. 22.

79. Royall Tyler to Joseph Pear se Palmer, February 17, 1787; quoted in Tanselle, Roy all Tyler, pp. 21–22.

80. Brown and Tupper, eds., Grandmother Tyler’s Book, p. 171.

81. Royall Tyler, The Contrast (1790; repr., New York: AMS, 1970), pp. 55–56. For an excellent discussion of the relationship between Shays’s Rebellion and Tyler’s first play, see Richard S. Pressman, “Class ‘Positioning’ and Shays’s Rebellion: Resolving the Contradictions of The Contrast,” forthcoming, Early American Literature. For Tyler’s manipulations of an American language, see Roger B. Stein, “Royall Tyler and the Question of Our Speech,” New England Quarterly, 38 (December 1965), 454–74.

82. Laura G. Pedder, ed., The Letters of Joseph Dennie, 1768–1812 (Orono: Univ. of Maine Press, 1936), pp. 145–46.

83. Péladeau, The Prose of Roy all Tyler, pp. 202–04.

84. Brown and Tupper, eds., Grandmother Tyler’s Book, p. 185.

85. Newbrough, ed., “Mary Tyler’s Journal,” p. 20.

86. Tanselle, Roy all Tyler, p. 5.

87. Brown and Tupper, eds., Grandmother Tyler’s Book, p. xvii.

88. A detailed account of Tyler’s politics and his life as a state supreme court judge can be found in Thomas P. Tyler, “Royall Tyler,” pp. 51–60.

89. Newbrough, ed., “Mary Tyler’s Journal,” pp. 23–26.

90. Mary Palmer Tyler to her daughter, Amelia, January 19, 1825, Royall Tyler Collection, Vermont Historical Society, Montpelier.

91. James Fenimore Cooper, Early Critical Essays, ed. James F. Beard, Jr. (Gainesville, Fla.: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1955), pp. 336–37. Cooper’s essay originally appeared in The Literary and Scientific Repository and Critical Review, 4 (May 1822).

92. John Adams quoted in Peter Shaw’s eloquent biography, The Character of John Adams, p. 311.

93. Cooper, Early Critical Essays, p. 370.

94. Although I disagree with a number of points raised by Larry R. Dennis in “Legitimizing the Novel: Royall Tyler’s The Algerine Captive,” Early American Literature, 9 (Spring 1974), 71–80, and especially what seems to me an artificial equation of sentimentality and women (Didn’t men write sentimental novels? Didn’t men read them?), his comments on the importance of Tyler’s view of history are perceptive.

95. The Algerine Captive, ed. Don L. Cook, p. 31, n.

96. See, especially, Sacvan Bercovitch’s splendid essay “How the Puritans Won the American Revolution,” Massachusetts Review, 17 (Winter 1976), 586–630.

97. Linda Hutcheon, “A Poetics of Postmodernism?” Diacritics, 13 (Winter 1983), esp. pp. 40–42.

98. Carson and Carson, Roy all Tyler, p. 60; Cathy N. Davidson and Arnold E. Davidson, “Royall Tyler’s The Algerine Captive: A Study in Contrasts,” ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature, 7 (July 1976), 53–67; Dennis, “Legitimizing the Novel,” esp. p. 76; James C. Gaston, “Royall Tyler,” in American Writers of the Early Republic, vol. 37 (Dictionary of Literary Biography), ed. Emory Elliott (Detroit: Gale, 1985), p. 283; Moore, ed., The Algerine Captive, p. viii; Spengemann, The Adventurous Muse, p. 124; and Tanselle, Royall Tyler, pp. 157–159.

99. Tanselle, Royall Tyler, pp. 153–54.

100. The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written by Himself 2 vols. (London: Printed by the author, 1789). This narrative, incidentally, also draws from others such as A Narrative of the Most Remarkable Particulars in the Life of James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw (Bath, Eng.: 1770).

101. See, for example, the Monthly Review (London), 42 (September 1803): “As friends rather than as critics, we shall only beg leave to observe that the contents of the first volume are more diversified and more amusing than those of the second” (p. 93), or the Monthly Anthology and Boston Review, 9 (November 1810), which insists that volume 2 is “much inferiour,” “common-place,” and “accompanied with many trite reflections” (pp. 344–47).

102. No longer protected by the British Navy, American ships became easy prey to Barbary pirates. By one estimate, there were some twelve hundred slaves in Algiers during the 1790s. For a fuller account, see Ray W. Irwin, The Diplomatic Relations of the United States with the Barbary Powers, 1776–1816 (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1931); and H. G. Barnby, The Prisoners of Algiers: An Account of the Forgotten American-Algerian War; 1785–1797 (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1966).

103. The Diary of William Dunlap, 3 vols. (1930; repr., New York: B. Blom, 1969), 1:174; the Monthly Review (London), 42 (September 1803), 93; and Monthly Anthology and Boston Review, 9 (November 1810), 346.

104. Typescript of the memoir of Thomas Pickman Tyler, p. 99, Royall Tyler Collection, Vermont Historical Society, Montpelier.

105. Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1973), p. 93.

106. Brown and Tupper, eds., Grandmother Tyler’s Book, pp. 258–59. A similar story is reported by William Czar Bradley, in a letter dated December 7, 1857, in the Royall Tyler Collection, Vermont Historical Society, Montpelier. Bradley notes that “an honest Westmoreland farmer” came into his father’s office after The Algerine Captive was published and began discussing Updike Underbill’s plight. When his father mentioned that the book was a novel and that the adventures were all fictitious, “the indignation of the farmer on hearing what he called the gross imposition was almost uncontrollable and would have delighted the author.”

Chapter 8

1. Royall Tyler, The Contrast (1790; repr., New York: AMS, 1970).

2. See especially, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Elementary Structures of Kinship (New York: Beacon, 1969), The Raw and the Cooked (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), and The Savage Mind (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1969).

3. Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1973), P. 54.

4. Ibid., p. 83.

5. For a brief but perceptive discussion of The Contrast as well as a reproduction of the original frontispiece of the 1790 publication of the play, see James C. Gaston, “Royall Tyler,” in American Writers of the Early Republic, vol. 37 (Dictionary of Literary Biography), ed. Emory Elliott (Detroit: Gale, 1985), pp. 280–82.

6. Quoted in Richard S. Pressman, “Class ‘Positioning’ and Shays’s Rebellion: Resolving the Contradictions of The Contrast,” forthcoming, Early American Literature. The class affiliation of early American theatergoers is also discussed perceptively by George C. D. Odell, Annals of the New York Stage, 15 vols. (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1927), vol. 1; and Kenneth Silverman, A Cultural History of the American Revolution (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1976), esp. pp. 545–54. Silverman notes that “the postwar depression gave the theatre controversy a new note of complaining bitterness. Many railed against the theatre as a cruelly flagrant, public witness of the social inequality produced by the war. Within were Haves, outside Have-Nots” (p. 548).

7. Charles G. Steffen, review of Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788–1850, Journal of the Early Republic, 4 (Winter 1984), 459.

8. Clearly the whole meaning of class must be adjusted to the American situation. For a fine theoretical introduction to social stratification, particularly as related to the American experience, see Bernard Barbar, Social Stratification: A Comparative Analysis of Structure and Process (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1957).

9. Although Joyce Appleby tends to simplify trends in recent historiography of the early national period by emphasizing its antiliberal bias, her analysis on the whole is extremely astute. See “Value and Society,” in Colonial British America: Essays in the New History of the Early Modern Era, ed. Jack P. Greene and J. R. Pole (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1984), pp. 290–316. My discussion is also indebted to Appleby’s “Commercial Farming and the ‘Agrarian Myth’ in the Early Republic,” Journal of American History, 68 (1982), 833–49, and “The Radical Double-Entendre in the Right to Self-Government,” in The Origins of Anglo-American Radicalism, ed. Margaret Jacob and James Jacob (London: Allen & Un win, 1984), pp. 275–83. For a concise account of modernization in America, see Richard D. Brown, Modernization: The Transformation of American Life, 1600–1865 (New York: Hill & Wang, 1976); and, for a critical analysis of modernization theory, Dean C. Tipps, “Modernization Theory and the Comparative Study of Societies: A Critical Perspective,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 15 (1973), 199–226.

10. Gary B. Nash, ed., Class and Society in Early America (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1970), p. 21.

11. Crévecoeur quoted in ibid., p. 26.

12. Selected Writings of Benjamin Rush, ed. Dagobert D. Runes (New York: Philosophical Library, 1947), pp. 333, 331.

13. Appleby, “Value and Society,” p. 308.

14. Georg Lukács, “The Old Culture and the New Culture,” in Marxism and Human Liberation, ed. and trans. E. San Juan, Jr. (New York: Dell, 1973), p. 9.

15. Marilyn Butler, Romantics, Rebels, and Reactionaries: English Literature and Its Background (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1981), p. 11. Butler also notes that “Otranto looks uncommonly like an attempt to graft on to the novel—the modern form concerned with money, possessions, status, circumstance—the heightened passions, elemental situations, and stylized poetic techniques of the Elizabethan dramatists” (p. 21). For an account of the reactionary measures in England during the 1790s, see E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Pantheon, 1964).

16. See especially the preface to the 2nd ed. of the Lyrical Ballads (1800) in William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads, ed. R. L. Brett and A. R. Jones (London: Methuen, 1963), pp. 248–49; and the Marquis de Sade’s essay “Idées sur les romans” (1800) in Oeuvres complètes du Marquis de Sade, 16 vols. (Paris: J. J. Pauvert, 1966), 10:15. For a provocative discussion of both, see Leslie A. Fielder, Love and Death in the American Novel, rev. ed. (1960; repr., New York: Dell, 1966), pp. 135–36.

17. See D. Gilbert Dumas, “Things as They Were: The Original Ending of Caleb Williams,” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, 6 (1966), 584; Gary Kelly, The English Jacobin Novel, 1780–1850 (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1976), pp. 179–84; and Raymond Williams, “The Fiction of Reform,” in Writing in Society (London: Verso Editions, 1984), pp. 145–49.

18. A good indication of the vast popularity of the Gothic genre, especially between 1790 and 1820, can be found by surveying Montague Summers, A Gothic Bibliography (London: Fortune, 1941). This popularity as well as the new narrative possibilities allowed by the Gothic form, are discussed by J.M.S. Tompkins, The Popular Novel in England, 1770–1800 (London: Methuen, 1932). The secondary literature on the Gothic is extensive, so I will here mention only a few titles that indicate the range of interpretation to which this provocative form has been subjected: Frederick Garber, “Meaning and Mode in Gothic Fiction,” in Racism in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Harold E. Pagliaro (Cleveland: Case Western Reserve Univ. Press, 1973), pp. 155–69; Robert D. Hume, “Gothic Versus Romantic: A Revaluation of the Gothic Novel,” PMLA, 84 (1969), 282–90; Elizabeth MacAndrew, The Gothic Tradition in Fiction (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1979); Lowry Nelson, Jr., “Night Thoughts on the Gothic Novel,” Yale Review, n.s., 52 (1962), 236–57; and Devendra P. Varma, The Gothic Flame (London: A. Barker, 1957).

19. Ronald Paulson, “Gothic Fiction and the French Revolution,” ELH, 49 (1981), 534–35.

20. Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Huntly or Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker (Kent, Ohio: Kent State Univ. Press, 1984), p. 154.

21. Margaret Atwood, Lady Oracle (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1976), p. 34. For an excellent discussion of the Female Gothic, see Ellen Moers, “Female Gothic,” and U. C. Knoepflmacher, “Thoughts on the Aggression of Daughters,” both in The Endurance of Frankenstein: Essays on Mary Shelley’s Novel, ed. George Le vine and U. C. Knoepflmacher (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1979), pp. 77–87, 88–119; and also the essays collected in Juliann E. Fleenor, ed., The Female Gothic (Montreal: Eden, 1983).

22. For a fuller discussion of the history of the Gothic in America, see Edith Birkhead, The Tale of Terror: A Study of the Gothic Romance (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1921), esp. pp. 139–42, 188–200; Oral S. Coad, “The Gothic Element in American Literature Before 1835,” JEGP, 24 (1925), 72–93; Joel Porte, “In the Hands of an Angry God: Religious Terror in Gothic Fiction,” in The Gothic Imagination: Essays in Dark Romanticism, ed. G. R. Thompson (Pullman: Washington State Univ. Press, 1974), pp. 42–64; Arthur Hobson Quinn, “Some Phases of the Supernatural in American Literature,” PMLA, 25 (1910), 114–33; Eino Railo, The Haunted Castle: A Study of the Elements of English Romanticism (London: George Routledge, 1927), pp. 300–25; Sister Mary Redden, The Gothic Fiction in American Magazines (1765–1800) (Washington, D.C.: Catholic Univ. of America Press, 1939); and Donald A. Ringe, “Early American Gothic: Brown, Dana, and Allston,” in American Transcendental Quarterly, 19 (1973), 3–8. See also “The Gothic Tradition in Nineteenth-Century American Literature: A Symposium in Two Parts,” ed. Richard P. Benton, Emerson Society Quarterly, 18 (1972), particularly the essays by Benton, Robert D. Hume, and Maurice Levy.

23. Two commentators on the Gothic have insisted that castles are a necessary and vital ingredient of the form. See Montague Summers, The Gothic Quest: A History of the Gothic Novel (1938; repr., New York: Russell & Russell, 1964), pp. 190–93, and Tompkins, The Popular Novel in England, p. 226. For a different but fascinating discussion of castle symbolism, see Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel, pp. 127–33.

24. See, especially, Michael Davitt Bell, The Development of American Romance: The Sacrifice of Relation (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1980).

25. Recent critical theory has just begun to focus attention on the Gothic and to pay attention to this antimimetic strain. I am indebted to Howard Anderson for allowing me to consult his paper “Surprised by Fear: Reading the Gothic,” originally presented at the Modern Language Association, San Francisco, December 1979. See also Christine Brooke-Rose, A Rhetoric of the Unreal: Studies in Narrative and Structure, Especially of the Fantastic (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1981); Shoshana Felman, “Turning the Screw of Interpretation,” in Literature and Psychoanalysis: The Question of Reading: Otherwise, ed. Shoshana Felman (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1977), pp. 94–207; David B. Morris, “Gothic Sublimity,” New Literary History, 16 (Winter 1984–85), 299–319; and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “The Character in the Veil: Imagery of the Surface in the Gothic Novel,” PMLA, 96 (1981), 255–70. For an older but equally imaginative reading of the Gothic, see André Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism (1924), trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1969).

26. Sigmund Freud, “The ‘Uncanny’,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth, 1953–74), 17:237–47. See also, Harold Bloom, “Freud and the Poetic Sublime: A Catastrophe Theory of Creativity,” in Freud: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Perry Meisel (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1981); Brooke-Rose, A Rhetoric of the Unreal, esp. 309–10; Hélène Cixous, “Fiction and Its Phantoms: A Reading of Freud’s Das Unheimliche (The ‘Uncanny’),” New Literary History, 7 (Spring 1976), 525–48; Morris, “Gothic Sublimity,” pp. 306–09; and Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, trans. Richard Howard (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1975).

27. For a discussion of the nightmare world of Radcliffe’s perceivers, see Butler, Romantics, Rebels, and Reactionaries, p. 95; Coral Ann Howells, “The Pleasure of the Woman’s Text: Ann Radcliffe’s Subtle Transgressions in The Mysteries of Udolpho and The Italian,” paper presented at the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, April 1985, Toronto; and Robert Kiely, The Romantic Novel in England (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1972), pp. 65–77.

28. Isaac Mitchell originally published the novel in weekly installments in the Poughkeepsie Political Barometer from June 5 to October 5, 1804, under the title “Alonzo and Melissa.” In the Barometer for April 17, 1811, he announced a subscription campaign for a “more ample and extended” edition of the novel, in two volumes, to be published by Joseph Nelson of Poughkeepsie and to be sold for $1.25 per volume for bound copies, $1 per volume in boards. Admitting that “novel” is “esteemed but a more courtly name for licentiousness,” Mitchell assured the reader that his novel was moral, American, and true. This version also included a ten-page introduction, a fifteen-page preface, and the long first volume describing the Berghers’ plight in Europe. The Jackson version (Plattsburgh, N.Y.: Printed for the Proprietor, 1811) included only the first page of the preface, omitted all of volume 1, and printed the whole of volume 2. Since both Mitchell and his publisher, Nelson, died within months after the novel’s original publication, the Jackson version was issued and reprinted without protest—although also without copyright. For more information on the controversy surrounding the curious publishing history of the novel, see the New York Times Saturday Review of Books for June 4, 1904; June 11, 1904; September 3, 1904; September 17, 1904; January 21, 1905; January 28, 1905; and March 4, 1905. Hereafter quotations from The Asylum are taken from the original Mitchell edition available on microfilm (ACS reel 226.7) and are cited parenthetically within the text.

29. Lillie Deming Loshe, The Early American Novel, 1789–1830 (1907; repr., New York: Frederick Ungar, 1966), pp. 56–57.

30. This copy of The Asylum (New York: Nafis and Cornish, n.d.) is the AAS collection.

31. Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Random House, 1965), and Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Random House, 1977). See also John Bender, “The Novel and the Rise of the Penitentiary: Narrative and Ideology in Defoe, Gay, Hogarth, and Fielding,” Stanford Literature Review, 1 (1984), 55–84.

32. Frederic Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1981), p. 48.

33. Harrison T. Meserole, “Some Notes on Early American Fiction; Kelroy Was There,” Studies in American Fiction, 5 (1977), 7. One copy of Kelroy at the Library Company of Philadelphia bears the delightful, Sternean inscription, “Presented to Miss Grace S. Itiebley [?] by her friend Corporal Trim.” For new archival research on Rush correcting the National Union Catalog entry, see Dana D. Nelson’s edition of Kelroy (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1992). Nelson argues convincingly that Rush did not write at least one other book attributed to her.

34. Samuel Austin Allibone, A Critical Dictionary of English Literature and British and American Authors, 3 vols. (Philadelphia: A. Childs and Peterson, 1855), 2: 1893.

35. For an astute discussion of both St. Herbert and Kelroy, see Henri Petter, The Early American Novel (Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press, 1971), pp. 188–89, 201–05.

36. Rebecca Rush, Kelroy, a Novel (Philadelphia: Bradford and Inskeep, 1812), p. 13.

37. Meserole, “Some Notes on Early American Fiction,” pp. 8–9, 11–12, perceptively assesses the symbolism of Mrs. Hammond’s death.

38. See Petter, Early American Novel, p. 330, n. 39, for a list of the Brownian devices in Watterston’s novels.

39. Brockden Brown’s comments on the law are quoted in Harry R. Warfel, Charles Brockden Brown: American Gothic Novelist (Gainesville: Univ. of Florida Press, 1949), p. 29.

40. The Diary of Elihu Hubbard Smith, ed. James E. Cronin (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1973), p. 14.

41. David Punter, The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present Day (New York: Longman, 1980), pp. 409, 417, 414.

42. The Brown bibliography is extensive. For an overview, see Charles E. Bennett, “The Charles Brockden Brown Canon,” Ph.D. diss., Univ. of North Carolina, 1974, “The Letters of Charles Brockden Brown: An Annotated Census,” Resources for American Literary Study, 6 (1976), 164–90, and “Charles Brockden Brown and the International Novel,” Studies in the Novel, 12 (1980), 62–64; Charles A. Carpenter, “Selective Bibliography of Writings about Charles Brockden Brown,” in Critical Essays on Charles Brockden Brown, ed. Bernard Rosenthal (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1981), pp. 224–39; Robert E. Hemenway and Dean H. Keller, “Charles Brockden Brown, America’s First Important Novelist: A Check List of Biography and Criticism,” Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 60 (1966), 349–62; Sydney J. Krause with Jane Nieset, “A Census of the Works of Charles Brockden Brown,” Serif 3 (1966), 27–55; and Patricia L. Parker, Charles Brockden Brown: A Reference Guide (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1980). For additional reviews, see Evelyn Sears Schneider, “The Changing Image of Charles Brockden Brown as Seen by American Critics from 1815 to the Present,” part 2 of a three-part Ph.D. diss., Rutgers Univ., 1971; and William S. Ward, “American Authors and British Reviewers 1798–1826: A Bibliography,” American Literature, 49 (March 1977), 5–6, and “Charles Brockden Brown, His Contemporary British Reviewers, and Two Minor Bibliographical Problems,” Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 65 (1971), 399–402. For Brown’s estimation of his relative worth as a novelist, see the journal entry of 1799 in William Dunlap, The Life of Charles Brockden Brown: Together with Selections from the Rarest of His Printed Works, from His Original Letters, and from His Manuscripts Before Unpublished, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: James P. Parke, 1815), 1:107. The Dunlap biography rewords materials in the Paul Allen biography that would have been published in 1814 but for Allen’s untimely death. A facsimile of the original printer’s proof has recently been reissued as The Life of Charles Brockden Brown (Delmar, N.Y.: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1975). An anonymous front-page editorial in the (Philadelphia) National Gazette for May 17, 1823, asked, “Why does not some enterprising American bookseller undertake a handsome, uniform edition of the Best Novels and Essays of the late Charles Brockden Brown?… It is painful to reflect upon the oblivion which the works of Brown have suffered here.” (Special thanks to Peter Onuf for calling this article to my attention.) John Neal continued this theme in his “American Writers, I and II,” Blackwood’s, 16 (October 1824), 305–11, 421–26; and for Brown as a misunderstood “man of genius,” see the anonymous “Brown’s Novels,” American Quarterly Review, 8 (1830), 312–37. William Hazlitt also called him a “man of genius” in “William Ellery Channing’s Sermons and Tracts,” Edinburgh Review, 50 (1829), 126–28.

43. Brown, “To the Public,” in Edgar Huntly, p. 3. See also Brown’s letter to James Brown, February 15, 1799, quoted in Dunlap, The Life of Charles Brockden Brown: “I find to be the writer of Wieland and Ormond is a greater recommendation that I ever imagined it would be” (p. 99).

44. Charles Brockden Brown, “To the Editor of the Weekly Magazine” in The Rhapsodist and Other Uncollected Writings, ed. Harry R. Warfel (New York: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1943), p. 136.

45. Samuel Miller, A Brief Retrospect of the Eighteenth Century, 2 vols. (New York: T. & J. Swords, 1803), 2:390.

46. Charles Brockden Brown, “The Editor’s Address to the Public,” Literary Magazine and American Register, 1 (October 1803), 4.

47. The interpretations of Arthur Mervyn come from, respectively: Charles Brockden Brown to James Brown, February 15, 1799, quoted in Dunlap, Life of Charles Brockden Brown, 2:98; Percy Bysshe Shelly, described in Peacock’s Memoirs of Shelley, ed. H.F.B. Brett-Smith (London: H. Frowde, 1909), p. 35; James H. Justus, “Arthur Mervyn, American,” American Literature, 42 (November 1963), 313; Patrick Brancaccio, “Studied Ambiguities: Arthur Mervyn and the Problem of the Unreliable Narrator,” American Literature, 42 (March 1970), 22, 26; Kenneth Bernard, “Arthur Mervyn: The Ordeal of Innocence,” Texas Studies in Language and Literature, 6 (1965), 446; Warner Berthoff, “Introduction” to Arthur Mervyn (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1962), p. xvii; James Russo, “The Chameleon of Convenient Vice: A Study of the Narrative of Arthur Mervyn,” Studies in the Novel, 11 (1979), 381; R.W.B. Lewis, The American Adam: Innocence, Tragedy, and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1955), p. 95; Petter, Early American Novel, p. 339; Alan Axelrod, Charles Brockden Brown: An American Tale (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1983), p. 135; Emory Elliott, Revolutionary Writers: Literature and Authority in the New Republic, 1725–1810 (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1982), p. 265; Jane Tompkins, Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790–1860 (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1985), pp. 62–93; Russo, “The Chameleon,” pp. 381–405; and Norman S. Grabo, The Coincidental Art of Charles Brockden Brown (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1981), p. 86.

48. Charles Brockden Brown, Arthur Mervyn or Memoirs of the Year 1793 (Kent: Kent State Univ. Press, 1980), p. 71. Hereafter quotations from this edition of the novel will be cited parenthetically within the text.

49. William Hedges, “Charles Brockden Brown and the Culture of Contradictions,” Early American Literature, 9 (Fall 1974), 123.

50. Although the whole of Franklin’s autobiography was not published until 1818, Brown could have read any of the paraphrases, redactions, and condensations of Part ι that appeared as early as May 1790 in the Universal Asylum and Columbian Magazine and all four parts that appeared in Mathew Carey’s American Museum in July 1790. The French translation of Part 1 (1791) was retranslated into English and published in London in 1793 in both the Lady’s Magazine and in two separate volumes. For the complete and complex history, see The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin: A Genetic Text, ed. J. A. Leo Lemay and P. M. Zall (Knoxville: Univ. of Tennessee Press, 1981), pp. xlvii–lviii; and, for a discussion, Betty Kushen, “Three Earliest Published Lives of Benjamin Franklin, 1790–1793: The Autobiography and Its Continuations,” Early American Literature, 9 (Spring 1974), 39–52; and “Letter to the Editor” by P. M. Zall, Early American Literature, 10 (Fall 1975), 220–21.

51. Axelrod, Charles Brockden Brown, pp. 148, 154.

52. Grabo, The Coincidental Art, pp. 112–26.

53. See the following anonymous essays: “Arthur Mervyn; or, Memoirs of the Year 1793,” Critical Review (London), 2nd ser., 39 (1803), 119; “On the Writings of Charles Brockden Brown, the American Novelist,” New Monthly Magazine, 14 (1820), 609–14; and “Of Wieland and Other Novels by Charles Brockden Brown of Philadelphia,” American Monthly Magazine, 1 (1824), 6–7. Also see Dunlap, The Life of Charles Brockden Brown, 2:29–30.

54. Letter of February 15, 1799, quoted in Dunlap, The Life of Charles Brockden Brown, pp. 97–99. In the first issue of his Weekly Magazine, Brown included a statement that might be construed as contradictory to the one in his letter to James: “Great energy employed in the promotion of vicious purposes, constitutes a very useful spectacle. Give me a tale of lofty crimes, rather than of honest folly” (quoted in John Ciernan, “Ambiguous Evil: A Study of Villains and Heroes in Charles Brockden Brown’s Major Novels,” Early American Literature, 10 [Fall 1975], 190).

55. Diary of Elihu Hubbard Smith, p. 272, lamented Brown’s erratic method. For other comments either by Brown or his contemporaries which suggest his own changeability, see Axelrod, Charles Brockden Brown, pp.14ff.

56. Michel Foucault, “What Is an Author?” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1977), pp. 113–38. One contemporary critic who does not privilege the author is Nina Baym in “A Minority Reading of Wieland,” in Critical Essays on Charles Brockden Brown, pp. 87–125.

57. Russo, “The Chameleon,” pp. 381–405, has capably documented the various openings in Brown’s text—although he has also sought, unwisely in my opinion, to close them.

58. Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel, esp. pp. 150–53. Two notably careful, convincing, historical readings of Arthur Mervyn, those by Emory Elliott in Revolutionary Writers and by Jane Tompkins in Sensational Designs, start with the same premises about the “mood of the times,” use similar literary methods and assumptions, but end up with radically different interpretations of the hero.

59. See Arthur Mervyn, pp. 10, 46, 72, 81, 111, 118, 122, and 154 for references to the rural life.

60. Tompkins, Sensational Designs, esp. pp. 62–71.

61. Elliott, Revolutionary Writers, p. 265; and, for a similar argument, Brancaccio, p. 25.

62. Diary of Elihu Hubbard Smith, p. 272.

63. “The Journal Letters,” in David Lee Clark, Charles Brockden Brown: Pioneer Voice of America (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1952), p. 103.

64. Mikhail M. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, trans. R. W. Rotsel (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1973), esp. chap. 5, and “Epic and Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist and ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1981), esp. pp. 3–40. See also, Jacques Derrida, “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” in The Structuralist Controversy, ed. Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1972), pp. 247–73. And for a deconstructionist reading of Brockden Brown, see Michael Kreyling, “Construing Brown’s Wieland: Ambiguity and Derridean ‘Freeplay,’ ” Studies in the Novel, 14 (1982), 43–54.

Chapter 9

1. For somewhat different versions of this anecdote, see Louis O. Mink, “Narrative Form as a Cognitive Instrument,” pp. 135–36, and Lionel Grossman, “History and Literature: Reproduction or Signification,” pp. 18–19, both in The Writing of History: Literary Form and Historical Understanding, ed. Robert H. Canary and Henry Kozicki (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1978).

2. For important discussions of oppositional criticism, see Frank Lentricchia, Criticism and Social Change (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1983), esp. p. 15; and Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1977), esp. pp. 112–13. My discussion has also been influenced by Nicola Chiaromonte, The Paradox of History: Stendahl, Tolstoy, Pasternak, and Others (London: Wiedenfeld and Nicolson, 1970); Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1973); and White, “The Historical Text as Literary Artifact,” in The Writing of History, pp. 41–62. On a more practical level, the eminent historian William H. McNeill, in Mythistory and Other Essays (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1985), has recently argued that world survival in part depends upon the recognition that one historian’s truth is another’s myth.

3. Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man (New York: Pelican Classics, 1969), pp. 140–41.

4. Charles Brockden Brown, Arthur Mervyn or Memoirs of the Year 1793 (Kent: Kent State Univ. Press, 1980).

5. The eighteenth century’s fascination with doubleness has been discussed by Sydney J. Krause, “Historical Essay,” in Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Huntly or Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker (Kent: Kent State Univ. Press, 1984), p. 296.

6. Moses Coit Tyler, A History of American Literature, 1607–1765, 2 vols. (1878; repr., Williamston, Mass.: Corner House, 1973), 1:v. These passages are quoted and discussed in Annette Kolodny’s important essay “The Integrity of Memory: Creating a New Literary History of the United States,” American Literature, 57 (May 1985), 291–307.

7. Harold Bloom, “Criticism, Canon-Formation, and Prophecy: The Sorrows of Facticity,” Raritan, 3 (1984), 1; and Kolodny, “Integrity of Memory,” pp. 291–307.

8. The relationship between pedagogy and literary theory is one of the most important issues now facing the profession. For an excellent discussion, see William E. Cain, The Crisis in Criticism: Theory, Literature and Reform in English Studies (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1984), esp. pp. 67–121 and 247–77. The theoretical journal boundary 2 is also planning two double issues (1986–1987) devoted primarily to the topic of ideology and the politics of humanities pedagogy. See also Nancy Hoffman, “White Women, Black Women: Inventing an Adequate Pedagogy,” Women’s Studies Newsletter, 5 (Spring 1977), 21–4; and the essays in The New Feminist Criticism: Essays on Women, Literature, and Theory, ed. Elaine Showalter (New York: Pantheon, 1985), esp. the essays by Barbara Smith, “Toward a Black Feminist Criticism” (pp. 168–85), and Deborah E. McDowell, “New Directions for Black Feminist Criticism” (pp. 186–99). For provocative discussions of the socializing role played by the traditional humanities, see Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1982); and Richard Ohmann, English in America: A Radical View of the Profession (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1976). For one of the starkest assessments of the function of the traditional humanities—“There has never been a document of culture which was not at one and the same time a document of barbarism”—see Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, trans. H. Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969), p. 253.

9. Two studies of anthologies—what is included, what excluded—have arrived at different, but not incompatible, conclusions about the politics of canonization. See the chapter “ ‘But Is It Any Good?’: The Institutionalization of Literary Value,” in Jane Tompkins, Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790–1860 (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1985), pp. 186–201, for an analysis of the ways in which the canon changes according to the prevailing economic, literary, and political interests of the generation (although each generation insists that it knows what constitutes a masterpiece). Susan Koppelman has isolated a different pattern in her survey of over a century of short story anthologies. She documents an almost unchanging percentage of both women writers (of all races) and black writers (of both sexes) in the anthologies, but she notes that each generation of anthologists tends to select new representatives for women and blacks. The result is a sense of historical amnesia, as if there were no tradition of women or minority writing in America. See the introduction to her anthology Old Maids: Short Stories by Nineteenth-Century U.S. Women Writers (New York: Pandora, 1984).

10. See Bernard Chevignard, “St. John de Crèvecoeur in the Looking Glass: Letters from an American Farmer and the Making of a Man of Letters,” Early American Literature, 19 (Fall 1984), 173–90; Everett Emerson, “Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur and the Promise of America,” in Forms and Functions of History in American Literature: Essays in Honor of Ursula Brumm, ed. Winfried Flunk et al. (Berlin: Erich Schmidt Verlag, 1981), pp. 44–55; and Albert E. Stone, Jr., “Crèvecoeur’s Letters and the Beginnings of an American Literature,” Emory University Quarterly, 18 (Winter 1962), 197–213.

11. Kenneth Silverman, A Cultural History of the American Revolution (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1976), p. 513.

12. Martha Meredith Read, Monima, or the Beggar Girl (New York: T. B. Jansen, 1803), pp. 434, 436, 440–41.

13. The ways in which purportedly aesthetic judgments are actually founded upon ideological (and often tautological) arguments has been perceptively analyzed by Nina Baym in “Melodramas of Beset Manhood: How Theories of American Fiction Exclude Women Authors,” American Quarterly, 33 (Summer 1981), 123–39.

14. Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1973), p. 72.

15. Dominick La Capra, History and Criticism (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1985), p. 126. For additional comments on the relationship between literature and history, see also La Capra’s Rethinking Intellectual History: Texts, Contexts, Language (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1983), esp. pp. 13–22. For an analysis of the politics of literature by a social historian, see Steven Watts, The Republic Reborn: War and the Making of Liberal America, 1790–1820 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1987). Two journals concerned with literary theory have recently addressed themselves to the relationships between literature and history. Poetics, 14 (1985), is devoted to the related issues of the empirical sociology of cultural production and the politics of writing the history of literature, and New Literary History, 16, no. 3 (1985), has similarly explored the politics of literary history.

16. Borges quoted in Walter L. Reed, An Exemplary History of the Novel: The Quixotic Versus the Picaresque (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 265.

17. Ibid., p. 264.

18. Margaret Atwood, Surfacing (Don Mills, Ontario: Paperjacks, 1972), p. 129.