Introduction to the Expanded Edition

New Genre, New Nation

When I began the research for Revolution and the Word in the 1970s, two stereotypes prevailed about early American fiction. The first assumption was that it did not exist. This isn’t true. Although most survey courses and anthologies of American fiction at the time began with James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Saga of the 1820s or sometimes with Wieland by Charles Brockden Brown, at least one hundred novels were produced in America between 1789 and 1820.¹ Novelists of the early national period read one another and often responded to one another’s plots. Readers avidly sought out novels. Publishers and proprietors of lending libraries advertised novels prominently as a way to attract readers to buy or borrow other kinds of books. Nonfiction authors of advice books, primers, histories, tracts, or sermons took up novelistic techniques or even claimed to be novelists as a way to reach the wider novel-reading public.

The second stereotype countered by Revolution and the Word was equally specious (and contradictory of the first): that novels published in the early Republic were imitations, if not outright plagiarisms, of Anglo-European fiction. This claim is also wrong but not surprising. Many early American novelists borrowed plots as the structure on which to hang their own adaptations, translations, and co-optations, sometimes writing new endings, often undermining the class assumptions of their progenitors. When American novelists took up themes, characters, and ideas from writers such as Samuel Richardson or Henry Fielding (or, more often, William Godwin and Ann Radcliffe), they also responded to and thereby differentiated themselves from their forerunners, often translating the sophisticated English or European metropolis to American soil and talking back with impudence if not overt critique. Revolution and the Word argues that the task of the early American novelist was to find a distinctive voice despite the dominance of British and European traditions and against the demoralizing derision of Anglo-European arbiters of value and good taste.²

That the originality of postrevolutionary American literature was invisible to many elites in the 1790s and continued to be so to subsequent literary historians should not be surprising given what we have come to learn in the past decades about colonial and postcolonial societies (a subject I will take up at length later in this introduction). However, to recall America’s humble colonial origins takes a tremendous act of imagination given the dominance of the United States on the world scene throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. As the historian Bernard Bailyn has summarized recently:

The American founders were provincials—living on the outer borderlands of an Atlantic civilization whose heartlands were the metropolitan centers of England, France, the Netherlands, and Spain. The world they were born into was so deeply provincial, so derivative in its culture, that it is difficult for us now to imagine it as it really was—difficult for us to reorient our minds to that small, remote world.… Language can mislead us. The vocabulary of politics in eighteenth-century America was metropolitan, transcultural, European if not universal; but the reality of the Americans’ lives, the political and social context in North America, was parochial.³

The urge to ape the imperial language is yet another feature of those attempting to express their legitimacy. No wonder then that derivativeness and plagiarism are two standard accusations leveled against postcolonial artists—now as in 1789 New England. Indeed, these two erroneous assumptions—that the early American republic produced no novels and that its novels were derivative—summarize the chief dismissals of postcolonial culture more generally.⁴ For this is the optic through which dominant culture views the artistic productions of its colonies (or, indeed, of its most marginalized subcultures): If it’s not about us, it doesn’t exist; if it is about us, that’s all it is.

Not only did the American novel exist as a definable, distinctive literary form, but also, as a genre, the novel played a significant role in shaping provincial and parochial identities and communities of the postrevolutionary era into the evolving entity that would become the United States of America. But it did not do so by championing the kind of “universalism” Bailyn ascribes to the Founding Fathers and their political documents. Most novelists were closer to what Grant Farred has defined as the “vernacular intellectual” in that they could both contribute to the nationalist agenda and also redefine that agenda for an audience only partially included in what Bailyn calls the “universalist” rhetoric of the Founding Fathers.⁵ Vernacular form has significant overlap (in address and audience) with mainstream culture and at the same time accrues vernacular power from its articulation of its separation from the overarching national (“universal”) culture.

The early American novel soon became the single most popular literary genre of its day. Circulating libraries boasted about (and exaggerated) the number of “novels” they stocked in order to draw in new members. One reason, I argue, for the popularity of early American novels was the way they coupled sensational plots with problems that were very much part of the nation-building enterprise (diffuse, varied, and often disharmonious) engaged in by Americans across the spectrum of class, region, religion, ethnicity, race, occupation, age, and gender in the 1790s.

Yet the nationalist agenda of the novel differs from the form codified and ratified in the founding political documents of the new nation and in particular the U.S. Constitution. To simplify a difference detailed in Revolution and the Word, novels tended to exemplify a range of energies and impulses expressed throughout the early national period but that did not survive in the final document ratified as the U.S. Constitution—including a political role for women.⁶ Popular history—and especially our legal system’s continual reference back to Constitutional precedence—has made the Constitution a monument, not the result of a process, representing only a fraction of those living in what would become the United States, that was sometimes divisive, contentious, and even cynical. Popular history and political polemic preserve an image of valiant revolution against an oppressive power, culminating in the creation of a unified new America proud of a Constitution that has stood for over two hundred years.

The transition was hardly so seamless. Fearing continuing riot, insurrection, and counterrevolution, the Constitutional Convention convened behind locked doors, enacted its compromises in secret, sealed its deliberations for fifty years, and emerged with one final document (although it was signed by only thirty-nine of those present, with Rhode Island never being represented in the final deliberations). Due to fears of rebellion, Madison’s notes on the convention were to be kept secret until all the men who participated in the convention had died.⁷

The novel operated (to speak metaphorically) among the populace milling outside those locked doors, a populace whose very existence challenged and thus influenced what happened within. In the minds of many of America’s leaders, the novel was more closely allied with the Whiskey Rebellion and Shays’s Rebellion (“the American Revolution’s final battle”) than with the Constitutional Convention.⁸ Rereading early American novels, understanding the role the novel played in debates on literacy and public education, allow us to see the variety of political and social topics at issue in the early national period. The novels reveal the contest over the shape the new nation should take, who might be the nation’s paradigmatic heroes and heroines, and who was being left out of the picture in the official version of America’s new “representative democracy.”

In undertaking to write Revolution and the Word, I was intrigued by a form so popular and yet so feared (including by some early U.S. presidents). Certainly a form purported to agitate the young, arouse female sexual desire, and inspire the headstrong to political radicalism couldn’t be all bad! Why was Charlotte Temple—a penniless and pregnant British schoolgirl who was educated and misled by a French teacher, seduced by a British soldier, and abandoned on American soil—the single most popular fictional figure of the early national period? For what did the “seduced and abandoned” heroine stand in the social psyche of early America? Revolution and the Word argues that a community of readers (men and women) turned to the novel as a way of participating in national debates on a range of problems that were both included and overlooked in the nation’s founding documents. Novels addressed ideas (such as abolitionism and female suffrage) that did not survive the secretive and partisan process of compromise, codification, and ratification that resulted in adoption of the final draft of the Constitution. Novels, in a sense, were the rough drafts for a range of problems vital to everyday life, both in and out of the public sphere.

Societies are characterized by conflict. Democracy is the system and structure that facilitates nonviolent conflict and debate. Without disagreement, there is no democracy. Nor can you have democracy without free speech. Defending dissent is a lesson in democracy—a lesson in how it is possible to criticize without disloyalty, oppose without treason. Opposition to one aspect of a ruling party’s policies does not mean one wants the collapse of “the government.” If government is of, by, and for the people, then dissent is the opposite of tyranny, the antithesis of disloyalty. Dissent is democracy in action.⁹

The novel is the paradigmatic democratic form. Conflict (of desire, motive, agency, principles) is the basis of fictional plot. The novel is not only about conflict—as is the case with democracy, without conflict there is no novel. In the early American novel what is especially notable (vis-à-vis the British novel and similar to fiction produced in other postrevolutionary societies) is how individual conflict becomes a metonym for national conflict and private vice a synonym for corruption of the polity. If the truism of the British novel is that it mirrors Enlightenment interest in individualism, the countering truism of the early American novel is that individual action is inseparable from the national: thus the abundance of prefaces, dedications, and other overt addresses in early novels that underscore the collective (or even national) significance of seduction, picaresque aimlessness, or gothic horror (to name the three major genres of early American fiction addressed in Revolution and the Word).

Novelists continued to “amend” the idea of the nation throughout the early national period. Nor were their additions always well accepted. Given the significance of the written word during the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, the rapid rise of the unruly genre of the novel caused anxiety to many who were attempting to create a stable, unified nation in the aftermath of the War of Independence.¹⁰ Free speech and dissent may be hallmarks of democracy—but that does not mean they are always welcome by those in positions of power. Rambunctious in its plots and expansive in its audience, the novel moved in a different direction from that adopted by many political leaders. Specifically, the new U.S. Constitution translated the Revolutionary principle of “equality” into a circumscribed and limited form of representative democracy, circumscribed in order to serve the larger goal of “unity.” It further attempted to constrain what John Adams referred to as “democratic despotism” with a codified and centralized government characterized by careful checks and balances among executive, legislative, and judicial branches.¹¹ By contrast, the novel imagined an unbridled version of the nation, featuring a vivid and diverse cast of characters whose wild adventures over the raw American landscape (and beyond) and whose excessive affect spoke to America’s tumultuous heart.

Given all of the different forms available to early American authors and the censure of fiction by many social arbiters, why did they choose to write novels rather than other kinds of books—and why did so many Americans choose to read them? I argue that the generic possibilities of fiction offered an opportunity to expand the public sphere in the face of what Dana D. Nelson has called the “de-politicizing logic of U.S. Constitutional nationalism.”¹² The Constitution centralized authority as a way of restraining, channeling, and even suppressing local expressions of democracy. Its proponents extolled its ability to encode a restricted and selectively representative form of democracy (namely, republicanism) and cast other examples of democratic political expression as anarchic, divisive, unpatriotic, and potentially violent.¹³ But what about those who were not represented or who believed in a less restrictive form of democracy? I argue that the novel provided an alternate public forum on democracy, based on a different cast of characters and texts with a seemingly limitless range of meanings and interpretations. Generically, the form encouraged the practice and underscored the importance of fanciful interpretation at the moment of nation building when the dominant, Madisonian political impulse went in the opposite direction. If politicians succeeded in restraining postrevolutionary energies with definitive rules of governance, novelists polemically or satirically exposed inconsistencies at the heart of the national self-image. More to the point, they saw their critique as patriotic, a vital contribution to the national identity.

The novel’s popularity lay in its ability to address the widest possible demographic of readers—Federalists and anti-Federalists, liberals and republicans. One reason the novel faced censure from many social arbiters was precisely because of its wide appeal. The line between novels and schoolbooks was a fine one, and the novel addressed the marginally literate who educated themselves outside the privileged traditions and values of the elite colleges. As is still the case today, the same novel might function as a light entertainment for the aristocrat or as a “primer” for the serving girl, a guidebook to social mobility. Novelists viewed the genre’s popular appeal and diverse audience as an opportunity to carry a message directly to the people. The decision to write a novel was an ideological choice (no matter what the specific ideology of a given author) because the ability to appeal to individuals without any mediation (by a preacher or an elected representative) was in and of itself a political topic in the early national period. Distributed through booksellers, circulating libraries, reading groups, or itinerant book peddlers, early American novels were read in the farthest reaches of the country, including in the unnamed territories, and fell into the hands of unknown and anonymous readers, many of whom continued to believe in the revolutionary aspirations to equality and freedom.

Understanding how the genre defined itself and reached its readership parallel with the creation of the United States helps us to delineate contending forces in the early Republic that are often erased in the heroic historiography of nation building. As Houston A. Baker, Jr., has written so eloquently in Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature:

Black and white alike have sustained a literary-critical and literary-theoretical discourse that inscribes (and reinscribes) AMERICA as an immanent idea of boundless, classless, raceless possibility in America. The great break with a Europe of aristocratic privilege and division has been filled by virtuoso rifts on AMERICA as egalitarian promise, trembling imminence in the New World.¹⁴

By studying the early American novel and its readership, we see how many felt and expressed disappointment in the loss of the “American dream” even at the originating moment of the dream.

The “first American novel” (so it proclaimed itself) was published as a national event perfectly timed with other founding events—and it embodies the disharmonious “vernacular culture” that I have been describing. Specifically, the newly ratified Constitution of the United States went into effect on March 4, 1789, with its famous Preamble:

We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States.

In January 1789, The Power of Sympathy—advertised grandly as “THE FIRST AMERICAN NOVEL”—was published with a preamble of its own:

To the young ladies of United Columbia, these volumes, intended to represent the specious causes and to expose the fatal consequences of seduction, to inspire the female mind with a principle of self complacency and to promote the economy of human life, are inscribed, with esteem and sincerity, by their friend and humble servant, The author.¹⁵

The textual parallels and contrasts between these two founding documents are fascinating in and of themselves. Audience, authorship, and purpose all differ. Instead of the presumed universal “we” of the Constitution (a “we” posited both as author and reader), there is a specified audience of “young ladies.” Authorship (although anonymous) is also individualized: the “friend and humble servant.” Instead of a more abstract call for a “more perfect union,” the novel focuses on the “specious causes” and “fatal consequences” of seduction. The “domestic tranquility” of the Constitution is literalized, individualized, and privatized. The novel is less concerned with the promise of a calm nation-state in the aftermath of a revolution than it is with the disruptions of private, domestic space.

However, the world of the Founding Fathers and that of the Founding Novel turn out not to be as divergent as they might seem to a contemporary reader. In fact, if mapped by a Venn diagram, the area of overlap would be significant, a fact that would have been known by any New Englander in 1789 who read the newspapers or heard the local gossip about the notorious scandal among America’s ruling class. Twenty-three-year-old William Hill Brown wrote The Power of Sympathy as a roman à clef In it, he accused his neighbor, Perez Morton (“Martin” in the novel), of seducing Fanny Apthorp, the beautiful young sister of Morton’s wife (the poet Sarah Wentworth Apthorp Morton)—an affair that, by the standards of the time, was considered to be incestuous. Morton was one of Boston’s wealthiest and most prominent citizens. When Fanny became pregnant, Morton denied he was the father. Her subsequent suicide led to an investigation of Morton’s behavior, an inquest, and an official coverup, culminating in a published (and false) exoneration penned by two even more famous Americans, Excellencies James Bowdoin and John Adams. William Hill Brown used the vehicle of the first American novel to gain justice—not in the court of laws but in the court of democratic and popular opinion. Public and private sphere merge in an extraordinary way in the plot of the novel and in the history of its publication. Brown left town soon after the publication of the novel; attempts were made to censor and withdraw The Power of Sympathy from circulation. By contrast, Perez Morton went on to become Speaker of the Massachusetts House of Representatives and the state’s attorney general, while Bowdoin became governor and Adams the second president of the United States.

Thus the American novel begins. Born in scandal, the American novel was scandal-mongering too. Moralistic and sensational. Political and sentimental. As I argue throughout Revolution and the Word, it is not a contradiction within the world of the early American novel that The Power of Sympathy can be a seduction novel while also being a protest against slavery and a tract on improved public education, especially for women. While the Constitution and official political documents such as the Federalist Papers attempted to formalize and constrain the riot of American life in the aftermath of its Revolution, the novel—as a form—reminded early American readers of vaguer aspirations implicit in an earlier document, the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

Indisputably, the novel as a genre was more inclusive in its audience and characters than was the new government. What is less clear is the specific political valence its populism entailed. Was the novel “liberal” (in our sense of the word or the very different eighteenth-century sense) or “conservative”? Neither. And both. Politically, it is impossible to characterize all of the early American novelists and their creations as one or the other, and, indeed, in any single novel one is likely to find a range of political positions, from progressive to reactionary, depending on the topic and sometimes even on what seems to be the same topic.¹⁶ Yet even for those novelists who implicitly or explicitly espoused a conservative political position (some were overtly Federalist, some were even latent Royalists), the genre conventions sometimes undermined the politics. For example, S.S.B.K. Wood (“Madam Wood,” as she was known) espoused socially conservative views on women, advocating an entirely submissive role for daughters and wives. Yet when she depicts such submissiveness in Amelia; or, The Influence of Virtue (1802), showing the virtuous Amelia repeatedly abused by a caddish husband, the specificity of harm done to a character with whom the reader empathizes makes the book seem less like advocacy for passivity than an argument for sturdy feminism of the Wollstonecraftian variety.

I am less interested in the explicit politics of specific early American novelists than I am with the range of characters (rich, poor, men, women, whites, Indians, immigrants, African Americans, etc.), the variety of experience (from seduction to cross-dressing to privateering), and the diversity of expression characteristic of the genre at this time. Early American novels were bold, assertive, declarative—episodic (even chaotic) in form, rebellious in affect (sentimental, sensational, frightening, or satirical). They walked on the dark side of the Enlightenment, exploring not just the middle class but also the lower classes, often focusing on the young or ill-educated, frequently focusing on females. As in The Power of Sympathy, young women were often misled or mistreated by the rich and powerful. These protagonists traveled in humbler social circles and could be motivated by love, patriotism, virtue, social climbing, sexuality, greed, despair, megalomania, corruption, deceit. Their ambitions (political, economic, social, sexual) often parodied the loftier aspirations of the nation as represented by its Founders or promulgated in political exhortations of the time.

Equally important, the complex class map drawn by the early American novel charted the different kinds of interactions among the social orders of the time, with egress in and out of the upper classes through the bedroom, kitchen, tavern, and back door. Along with freedom of religion, a fluid class structure was one of America’s defining differences with England. “There is no class in America” has been a recurring theme from the nation’s inception. Yet no one reading the body of fiction produced in the early Republic would find a representation of a classless society. On the contrary, early American novelists present (and often critique) the American version of a non-egalitarian class system.¹⁷

Although less precise in its social architecture than the upstairs and downstairs of late-eighteenth-century British fiction, class is a major determinant of social justice in numerous early American novels. On the most sinister level, black marketing, the slave trade, political campaigns, military actions, and the callous circulation of young women all expose social interconnections and dependencies among the classes. In political novels such as Hugh Henry Brackenridge’s Modern Chivalry (1792–1815), the representation of the public sphere is generally less divided between men and women than between upper and lower classes. Sometimes little more than a stone’s throw separates the rabble from the elite, yet few manage to actually transcend that divide. Scenes of domesticity rarely cross class lines. Forms of address, networks of affiliation, friendship, and influence operate by rules so absorbed into the fabric of everyday life that they need not be spoken. Cross-class ambition and upward mobility simply underscore the obstacles of class that need to be overcome, whether exemplified by mythologized self-representations such as those by Benjamin Franklin in his evolving autobiography or by the novelist Charles Brockden Brown in his Gothic reprisal of the Franklinesque rise from rags to riches in Arthur Mervyn (1799–1800). Passion—typically sexual—also both confuses and emphasizes class relations, with the inequality of gender doubled when the “wronged woman” is (quite typically in American as well as British fiction) a humble serving girl.

Early American novels, somewhere in their plots, typically provide class allegories, yet it is not entirely clear how those allegories were read, by whom, and to what social end. We know that the audience of the novel crossed class lines, extending from the very rich to those who were quite poor. The stereotypical way this happened was that the maid read the novels that she borrowed and returned to the local lending library for her mistress. Yet I am suggesting that a cross-class audience does not equate with “democratization.” Given the indeterminacy of meaning in novels as well as their affective power, it is safe to say that, even when reading the same novel, mistress and maid probably did not draw the same class moral; while each may have been moved to sympathy, it is not at all clear that they felt the same range of sympathy for the same characters or savored the same sense of virtue rewarded at the novel’s ending.¹⁸

We know from various sources that the popularity of certain novels, in particular Charlotte Temple and The Coquette, crossed class, gender, and regional lines. In one sense, one could say that this popularity contributed to the “shared national culture” that was vaunted as an ideal in the eighteenth century as it has been sporadically throughout American history. Revolution and the Word asks what we mean by that word shared. Is reading the same book sharing a culture? In some ways it is since it means a body of referents that individual readers can recognize. However, the meaning one makes of those references can vary radically depending upon the experiences and sympathies one brings to a text—and especially a text as open-ended (and stirring) as a novel. As Gayatri Spivak emphasizes, whenever one evokes a “shared national culture” the question must be asked: Shared by whom?¹⁹ It further must be asked: And shared in what way?

Revolution and the Word attempts to answer that question on many levels, including by proposing the most complete ethnography we have to date of an early American readership: who bought novels and who borrowed them (at minimal expense) through the ever-expanding network of the nation’s circulating libraries. From many different forms of evidence, Revolution and the Word also attempts to provide an affective account of early American reading. How did these early novel readers feel about the books they bought or borrowed? Did they find self-expression through the reading of novels that they did not find in the celebratory beginnings of the new nation?²⁰ Revolution and the Word raises questions about the outlines, bonds, relationships, and obligations of membership in both structured and loose settings, literary communities, and reading associations—ethnographic and interpretive questions of the kind asked, in a different context, by Elizabeth McHenry in her brilliant study of African American literary societies.²¹

In some cases, novels were a vehicle of dissent in a form easily recognizable as political in their form of engagement. These novels fit most neatly into the concept of a public sphere as defined by Jürgen Habermas and many Habermasian critics of the public sphere, most notably Michael Warner for the early national period. This world was defined largely as male, explicitly and implicitly.²² Yet male and female worlds, public life and inner life, were not rigidly segregated as either eighteenth-century moral authorities or twentieth-century critics might believe. Later in this introduction, I will return to the gender assumptions embedded in discussions of the public sphere; here I will simply note that female as well as male novelists debated topics raised in the public sphere (and both—sometimes pseudonymously or anonymously—also addressed problems often relegated to the “private sphere”). Some novelists used the cover of satire, effusive language, or sensational plots to covertly address the contradictions in representative democracy. This was especially true after President John Adams attempted to control “mobocracy” by passing the draconian Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 (which penalized myriad forms of written or oral protest, labeling them “malicious” and “seditious”). Sentimental, picaresque, and gothic novels provided one means to allegorize dissent—and evade legal persecution—under the protective cover of a genre considered “imaginary.”

Using a variety of forms, methods, techniques, and plots, the early American novel expressed the multiple and contradictory aspirations of a postcolonial and postrevolutionary society while the official business of government was to create a “United States.” Unruly forces had been stoked (“No taxation without representation!”) to incite the American Revolution; now those energies had to be repressed, constrained, and contained. As Antonio Negri has recently argued, if revolutions are based on Utopian dreams, constitutions are designed to prevent the anarchic imaginings that lead to revolution.²³

Postrevolutionary America was not the tidy or unified world conjured up at historical theme parks, Fourth of July parades, or presidential inaugurations. Nor was it the egalitarian utopia sometimes attributed to our “origins,” especially by Constitutional fundamentalists attributing omniscience retrospectively to the Founding Fathers. On the contrary, postrevolutionary America exhibited divisiveness, counterrevolutionary military and mob actions, and disappointed expectations—as well as the strong communal desire for order, an end of violence, widespread prosperity, and the creation of a truly representative democracy. How to achieve those ends; who would and would not be represented in the democracy; how prosperity could be decentralized; and who had claim to the label “American” were all vibrant topics of the early national period. They are the kinds of populist ideals expressed in virtually all postcolonial societies.²⁴ So where do we go to find traces of that heterogeneous version of the new Republic? The early American novel is one of the best sources. Decentralized, polyphonic, almost impossible to pin down, the novel echoed energies that many political leaders wanted to harness and voiced a disquiet that the new engine of government was designed to still. The coemergence of the American novel with the new nation reminds us that “nationalism” was a process, even a contest, about what shape thirteen colonies would assume in the wake of their successful revolt against England.

The United States as a Postcolonial Nation

An early essay that attempted to understand early American literature through the lens of postcolonial theory is Lawrence Buell’s “American Literary Emergence as a Postcolonial Phenomenon” (1992). Buell notes: “As the first colony to win independence, America has a history that Americans have liked to offer as a prototype for other nations, yet which by the same token might profitably be studied by Americans themselves in light of later cases.” He observes that there are “formidable barriers” to “analogizing between this country’s literary emergence and even that of Canada or Australia, let alone West India or West Africa” and modestly describes himself as a novice in this comparative enterprise. He further warns of the suspicion of hypocrisy that might attach to anyone who describes America’s expansionist years as “postcolonial rather than protoimperial.”²⁵ That distinction appears, in various forms, throughout much criticism of nationalism and postcolonialism written in the 1990s and the early twenty-first century. It is central to the essays in the landmark 1993 volume edited by Amy Kaplan and Donald Pease, The Cultures of U.S. Imperialism, as well as the forum in the Journal of American History generated by Ann Laura Stoler’s “Tense and Tender Ties: Intimacies of Empire in North American History and (Post) Colonial Studies.”²⁶

If “postcolonialism” brings with it a specific implication of a release from prior colonial oppression, what does it mean to apply such a term to the nation that, for the past one hundred years, has been the dominant power on the globe? To do so entails risks in at least two directions. On the one hand, it is essential to remember that the whole project of coming to the New World was a form of “settler colonialism” based on the confiscation of land from its inhabitants, the eradication of the land claims of those people, territorialization, and the pacification and ultimately genocide against those inhabitants.²⁷ The process of settling the harsh New World was also accomplished by the capture and enslavement of Africans, countless numbers of whom died during the Middle Passage. Later in this introduction, in the section entitled “Race Studies,” I will return to the interconnections among those factors—settler colonialism, genocide against indigenous peoples, and slavery (the intersection of postcolonial and race theory)—as well as their connections to imperialism and capitalism. The intertwined horrors of that foundational moment in the history of Western imperialism cannot be overstated.

On the other hand, one is remiss not to remember that the white settlers in the New World were also colonials who, in 1776, severed their relationship with Britain through violent revolution. It is essential that we try to understand the complex and ambiguous legacy of America’s settler colonialism on behalf of an imperial power; its revolution against that imperial power; the larger context of world systems of imperialism, capital, and the trade in humans; and the equally significant context of widespread revolutionary actions within Europe itself (France, Geneva, Holland, Poland, Ireland, Naples, etc.) and the Caribbean (most notably, Haiti). This complex story of origins (with its contradictory narratives of power and powerlessness, isolation and global superiority) has had a formative impact on American ideology to the present, including on America’s infinitely refreshable self-concept as the innocent and its self-appointed role as world crusader. Particular actions at home or abroad—throughout our history—have not disturbed the mythic identity.

THE INTERTWINED LEGACIES of colonialism and postcolonialism are not foregrounded in the original edition of Revolution and the Word. Indeed, the word “postcolonial” is not in its index, even though the creation of a culture in the wake of a revolution is its primary subject. I was doing research and writing in the 1970s and early 1980s, before the flourishing of postcolonial studies. Within a year of the publication of Revolution and the Word, two important books on the history of postcolonial theory appeared, the translation into English of Tzvetan Todorov’s The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other and Gayatri Spivak’s In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics. Although they are radically different kinds of studies, each addresses relationships of culture and the state under postcolonial conditions.²⁸

Since the publication of Revolution and the Word, I have continued to think about the meaning of a postrevolutionary culture in the context of complex histories of colonialism and postcolonialism, throughout Canada, the Caribbean, and the Americas. As Dana Nelson has recently noted in a review essay, “From Manitoba to Pantagonia,” most of the work on postcolonialism and the United States and on inter-American studies has not come from Americanists but from those working in other national traditions and in other languages. Indeed, perhaps because of the strong exceptionalist tradition of American studies, much of our scholarship has been insular. (It is a classic feature of American studies programs, for example, not to require languages other than English—despite the efforts of many scholars to expand the definition of “America” beyond those productions written in English.)²⁹ Personally, I find the move away from nation-based cultural studies toward theories of interactions, responses, networks, and interconnections extremely fruitful and find equally productive recent work on the cultural expression of subcultures and subalterns, a term that is disputed by many but that continues to signal the role of those disenfranchised within the nation-state or inhabiting the stateless world of the migrant “resident alien.” Analyses of these problems run the gamut from world systems theory proposed by Immanuel Wallerstein, subaltern studies articulated and subsequently refined by Gayatri Spivak, cosmopolitanism as addressed by Homi K. Bhabha, European provincialism and ideological translation as addressed by Dipesh Chakrabarty, globalization and cultural movements as assessed by Arjun Appadurai, globalization from below as described by Walter Mignolo, and immigration and the mobilization (or immobilization) of culture as discussed by Lisa Lowe.³⁰ In my 1993 presidential address at the American Studies Association, I alluded to the potential of transnational American studies to move beyond naive “American exceptionalism” that has been the trap of American studies since its inception as a discipline.³¹ Increasing numbers of scholars are taking up this challenge to exceptionalist thinking, looking more closely at the colonial/postcolonial legacies of the American past.

Many problems I address in Revolution and the Word are pertinent in the various histories of postcolonial societies and indigeneity, especially in Latin America (especially addressed by Mignolo) and South Asia (by Chakrabarty)—from literacy rates (and the debate over who could or should be allowed to read and at whose expense) to public education, to primitive book distribution networks, to the relationship between the official national rhetoric of self-definition and cultural forms that express alternative ideals. Without the benefit of the last fifteen years of postcolonial theory, Revolution and the Word proposed a “test case” for how those within a marginal and developing nation can use a marginal and nascent cultural form to represent aspirations, disappointments, ambitions, frustrations, and contradictions that get minimized in the official process of nation building.³²

But the question remains: if postcolonial theory is fraught when applied to early U.S. culture, why apply it? What can we learn from explanations that map only crudely onto the complex and ambiguous case of America’s postcolonial origins? I am arguing that postcolonial theory helps give us the insights and keywords necessary to foreground the diverse and discordant ideological and aesthetic productions shaping the nascent nation-state into what would become the “United States of America.” I am arguing, further, that this is a necessary corrective to nationalist accounts of those origins.

Postcolonial theorists understand state formation as a conflictual process—a process in which some opinions emerge triumphant, instantiated in the documents of government, while others persist to antagonize the new state (sometimes resulting in state-sanctioned acts of repression and retaliation). Postcolonial theory is antinationalist in its impulses if by “nationalism” we mean a unified, unitary, isolated state. It is thus useful in helping us to see which elements in the new Republic may have indigenous particularities and which are part of the process of postcolonial self-definition. Rethinking the early Republic as a postcolonial society can help us move beyond a jingoistic historiography that homogenizes the past, erasing its violence, minimizing its undemocratic features, and harmonizing its discord. Nostalgic versions of the early national period erase both the struggle and the compromise over the creation of the nation.

As I suggest throughout this introduction, it is a challenge even for historians of the period to remember the fledgling and contestatory origins of the most powerful nation on the globe. Let me use one recent example to make this point. David McCullough’s Pulitzer Prize-winning best-seller, John Adams, clearly sets out to give stature and luster to America’s second president, a president who has been overshadowed by his place between the towering figures of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. It is perhaps with this popularizing objective in mind that McCullough passes over hastily and defensively the passage of the 1798 Alien and Sedition Acts during Adams’s presidency. These laws made immigrants vulnerable to deportation and native-born citizens vulnerable to fines and imprisonment for speaking out against the U.S. government, and most specifically against the Federalist Party then in power. The Alien and Sedition Acts created a picture of an embattled new Republic cowering under the threat of British imperial power and dangerous French revolutionaries abroad, and the dangers of populist insurrections, Indian attacks, and slave revolts within its borders. The more immediate thrust of the Alien and Sedition Acts, however, was to ensure the destruction of Thomas Jefferson’s Republican Party. The Republicans, after all, had expressed sympathy for the French revolutionaries—which is no doubt why the Federalist-controlled Congress passed the Sedition Act on July 14 (Bastille Day). After passage of the Alien and Sedition Acts, immigrants were deported and newspaper editors arrested for criticizing the president of the United States, conspiring to oppose any measure of the government, or intimidating officeholders through dissent and critique. Benjamin Franklin’s grandson, Benjamin Franklin Bache, editor of the Philadelphia Democrat-Republican Aurora, was among the twenty-five editors and writers of Republican newspapers who were arrested and whose newspapers were shut down under the Alien and Sedition Acts. These have been called the most serious abrogation of the right of free speech prior to the McCarthy era in U.S. history. And they were passed by only the second president of the United States.

McCullough refers to these events only a few times in his enormous biography, using the word “infamous” but never describing how they were infamous, what the acts said, or how much they compromised the ideology of freedom that most Americans attribute to the Founders. I use this graphic example to underscore a tendency of history to celebrate origins. In contrast, postcolonial histories are predicated on a different model of historical scholarship, not teleological in impetus but explanatory in terms of complex networks of capital, domination, control, communication, and cultural production that do not start and stop at the borders of what comes to be defined (at least for a time) as a “nation.” The explanatory thrust of postcolonial history and theory lies in their sophisticated and subtle explanation of the workings of power, not just of the dominating group but of subgroups (“subalterns”). Universalist or heroic history has to erase or minimize contradictions such as the second president of the United States passing the Alien and Sedition Acts. Most Americans have forgotten this controversial moment in our own nation’s founding, just as they have forgotten that many Republicans in the new nation supported the French Revolution.³³ Indeed, the spectacularized differences between the “sane” American and “irrational” French Revolution in popular history are part of the same tendency to use history to justify the status quo.

It should be added that dissent triumphed over the Alien and Sedition Acts. The outcry against implementation of the Alien and Sedition Acts was so vehement that Jefferson won his bid for the presidency. By 1801, he had pardoned all those convicted of sedition. In 1802, the Republican-controlled Congress repaid fines levied against those convicted with interest and repealed the Naturalization Act. The remaining Alien and Sedition Acts were simply allowed to expire.

Why is it important to remember discord in the world of the Founding Fathers? One reason is because of the function nostalgic history serves in the present. It supplies a false teleology. The economic and political power of the United States from the late nineteenth century to the present is seen to be based on moral superiority, colonial expansionism, a mission on behalf of “Truth, Justice, and the American Way” (as Superman comics tell us). Critics from Perry Miller to Sacvan Bercovitch have analyzed the ideological embrace of moral superiority (the jeremiad) which is deep in the fiber of not only “America” but “Americanism.”³⁴ On what is that boastful moralism based? Christopher Newfield argues eloquently, in The Emerson Effect, that “moderation”—not freedom, equality, free speech, dissent, difference, individualism, or separation of church and state—is the most consistent and foundational American value.³⁵ Paradoxically, although “freedom” has been America’s most persistent rallying cry (the basis for its jeremiads), exercising freedom and articulating political differences have been castigated (and sometimes legally suppressed) throughout American history, including at its very beginning.

Nationalist history casts disagreement as “anti-American”—as dissent from an assumed, if unarticulated, consensus rather than as an invaluable contribution to a process that is innately and definitionally “democratic.”³⁶ As the social philosopher Jacques Rancière notes, “consensus thinking conveniently represents what it calls ‘exclusion’ in the simple relationship between an inside and an outside. But what is at stake under the name of exclusion is not being-outside. It is the mode of division according to which an inside and an outside can be joined.” Rancière argues that “exclusion” is the form of that division, but since exclusion from political process means that one is invisible (i.e. unrepresented), there is almost no way to characterize the excluded except by their exclusion. The excluded are outside of (and irrelevant to) the political debate of those inside. “The ‘exclusion’ referred to is the very absence of a representable barrier.”³⁷ A statement such as “All men are created equal” begs the question of “all women” as well as of those men (typically, of color) who aren’t. This is the problem of consensus arguments about America history, arguments that begin in foundational colonial and postcolonial moments, rendering a long American history of disagreement invisible by branding disagreement “un-American.”

When viewing the ideological histories of other nations, including postcolonial states, one often encounters examples of political dissent treated as un-patriotic or even treasonous (conditions implicit in the labeling of certain forms of expression “un-American”). However, rarely does one find governmental suppression of political protest occurring simultaneously with an idealistic national commitment to the protection of free speech. In established capitalist democracies, it is almost inconceivable to label criticism of the ruling political party as antithetical to the nation. The most vituperative British member of Parliament, railing against the prime minister, is still British, maybe even definitively so because of the railing. He or she would rarely be called “un-British” or “anti-British.” In considering the rich body of theory and history on nation building, it becomes clear that one of the defining features of Americans is the ease with which we pronounce other citizens “un-American” or “anti-American” for relatively mild protests against the status quo. In many democracies, this tendency in itself would be seen as antidemocratic and thus threatening. As Homi K. Bhabha notes, “nation” is a convenient epithet to express the authenticity of cultural locale. But what does “nation” really mean? Nationalism—like colonialism—is presented as seamless (not fragmented, fractured, and contradictory), perhaps because nationalism always risks breaking apart at its seams.

We always need to ask ourselves who is or is not allowed to speak in the name of the nation.³⁸ And, in the case of the United States, we have to ask, in historical terms, what it means when certain voices are excluded from the national registry, as it were. In virtually every postcolonial society seeking to establish some form of democratic rule, obscure, coercive, and secret processes are required to reach a compromise among factions in order to create systems of governance. But what does it mean when the compromise to create a government requires a jettisoning of the nation’s core values of freedom and equality? What does it do to a nation, for example, to accept slavery in its founding documents? The acceptance of slavery was not a pat decision. Although it did not seem to bother most men at the Constitutional Convention that women were not represented in the new government, the topic of slavery caused consternation, bitterness, and argument that lasted for months and threatened to end the Convention without the creation of a constitution. What would such an early acquiescence on the principle of freedom and equality (principles that had fueled a revolution) mean to the moral fabric of the nation?³⁹

The most important consequence of such an early and profound bartering away of a foundational principle of freedom is that compromise for the sake of national unity itself becomes the highest principle of the nation. Compromise on behalf of solidarity and nationhood supersedes freedom and equality and, indeed, all other principles. The argumentative logic of this elevation of compromise to the highest level of principle is that, without the unified nation, no other principles are possible. The logical inconsistency that is pushed aside is that, if those other principles have been forfeited already, why do we need the unified “United States” to protect them? That is the unaskable question. America is freedom, definitionally—so much so that it does not have to be always free and equal in order to support freedom. It only has to be “America.”

Constitutional compromise solidified America’s ambivalent ideology of freedom. Even the concept of “dissent” implies an overall consensus from which departure is (barely) tolerated. Yet dissent happens constantly (as witness the opposition to the Alien and Sedition Acts leading to Jefferson’s victory). Unsuccessful dissent is forgotten or forever vilified. Successful dissent, in retrospect, is preserved as success, not as dissent. Its outcome becomes part of the national mythology of both compromise and freedom: the Revolutionary War itself, the abolitionist movement that led to a civil war to end slavery, late-nineteenth-century suffragist movements that resulted in women gaining the vote, labor movements that regulated safety and wages, opposition to McCarthyism, or the Civil Rights movement that ended legalized segregation are a few of the most prominent examples. The way history is told means that radical acts become mainstream when they succeed. Or to reverse that: to succeed is to have been right all along. But is the converse also true? Does failure to change the society mean one was wrong to try?

Revolution and the Word returns us to the exact moment when process, not product, was the topic at hand. Early American novels struggle with the regulation of private behavior in the face of public morality, the relationship between democratic representation and ignorance, the containment of political strife in a republic, and the reasonable articulation of social discord in the aftermath of a revolution and on the brink of creating a highly unstable new government. We must remember that newspapers in the early national period were partisan, frequently vicious, and sometimes bordering on the slanderous. The novel, while not specifically affiliated with political parties, candidly articulated a wide range of political and social opinions.

A number of postcolonial critics have argued about the novel’s role in providing this form of “uncompromised” expression—raw, discordant, even cacophonous—in a postcolonial setting, beginning with Benedict Anderson’s early work on the role of culture in nation building, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Although many subsequent critics have built upon, challenged, or in other ways reacted to Imagined Communities, it is worth returning to this influential text to see the parallels between early American novels and the novels of colonial Mexico. Anderson analyzes the novel purported to be the first Latin American novel, José Joaquín Fernandez de Lizardi’s El Periquillo Sarniento (1816).⁴⁰ He describes it as a “ferocious indictment of Spanish administration in Mexico.” It is a picaresque novel; “the movement of a solitary hero through a sociological landscape of a fixity that fuses the world inside the novel with the world outside” allows the novelist to describe hospitals, prisons, schools, monasteries, cities, and remote villages. The picaro himself embodies, in Jean Franco’s terms, “the parasitism and laziness” encouraged by the “Spanish government and education system.”⁴¹ In Anderson’s formulation, this novel—through its extensive tour of the Mexican landscape in the context of Spanish political rule—helps constitute a “national imagination” for the readers of colonial Mexico.

I quote Anderson here because his description could apply, with little change in emphasis, to a number of novels in the postcolonial United States, most notably those I discuss in the chapter on “The Picaresque and the Margins of Political Discourse.” Hugh Henry Brackenridge’s sprawling, multivolume comic epic Modern Chivalry, for example, takes the American reader on the same kind of tour through cities teaming with impoverished immigrants or to the countryside populated by rude farmers, scheming politicians, religious fanatics, or displaced Indians. Brackenridge satirizes the new American democracy; the oppressive force here is no longer England (for colonial rule is no longer at issue) but the defects in postrevolutionary American democracy. Captain Farrago, arguably the novel’s chief protagonist, provides the exceptionally ambiguous voice of quirky rationalism. Intriguingly, in this passage Captain Farrago sounds both like James Madison and like a critic of Madison:

Why should I undervalue democracy; or be thought to cast a slur upon it; I that am a democrat myself.… Nor is it democracy, that I have meant to expose; or reprehend, in any thing that I have said; but the errors of it: those excesses which lead to its overthrow.

These excesses have shown themselves in all democratic governments; when it is that a simple democracy has never been able to exist long. An experiment is now made in a new world, and upon better principles; that of representation and a more perfect separation, and near equipoise of the legislative, judicial, and executive powers. But the balance of the powers, is not easily preserved. The natural tendency is to one scale. The demagogue is the first great destroyer of the constitution by deceiving the people. He is no democrat that deceives the people. He is an aristocrat.⁴²

In this passage, Farrago’s fear of democratic unrest is secondary to his apprehensions about the tendency toward aristocracy that he witnesses in the present U.S. government. And interestingly, Captain Farrago is the conservative voice in the novel. But this political positioning should not be surprising given that Brackenridge was an eccentric Princeton-educated classicist turned backwoods lawyer who served as a mediator at the Whiskey Rebellion, a rural insurrection of farmers mostly from rural Pennsylvania, and one of the first tests of federal authority. The farmers protested an excise tax levied by the U.S. government on the producers of whiskey. To quell the gathering mob, George Washington assembled a militia of nearly thirteen thousand men. Brackenridge was called in to mediate between the rebels and the militia, and to be a slippery spokesman for both sides and neither. His hero Captain Farrago similarly switches sides, often in reaction to the outlandish (but often charismatic and always shrewd) actions of his Irish servant, Teague O’Regan. But for Farrago, O’Regan could have been elected to the state legislature, ordained a Presbyterian minister, named chief of the Kickapoo Indians, or made a member of the august American Philosophical Society. To return to Anderson’s formulation, with far more texture than one would ever find in one of the nation’s founding documents, Brackenridge’s hero and antihero, moving like a postcolonial Don Quixote and Sancho Panza over the American landscape, allow us to see the inner workings of a range of institutions—the new democratic government, the ministry, tribal governance, and academe. Modern Chivalry both reveals and helps to constitute a “national imagination” for the readers of the new United States.

The difference between the body of work Anderson analyzes and the novels described in Revolution and the Word is that the former are colonial novels and the latter are written in North America after a revolution from a colonial power. In intent and in political impact, early American novels may more closely resemble the nineteenth-century postrevolutionary Latin American novels that Doris Sommer calls “foundational fictions.” Yet if those novels are designed to end conflict and promote unity, despite a range of opinions and disagreements evidenced in the plots, then we have another fascinating difference, for in early American novels it is not at all clear that unity is the end result—especially in novels where “union” is the explicit goal.⁴³ America’s foundational fictions are, more typically, antifoundational.

Noteworthy in America’s postcolonial novels is that England is rarely a site of nostalgia or reactionary longing (even for the most socially conservative American writers). On the other hand, England is hardly ever summoned up as a metaphor for evil oppression either. When England is represented negatively, it is typically because England mirrors problems in the new Republic. Colonial oppressor and new national government are interchangeable, as in Washington Irving’s famous political jibe in “Rip Van Winkle” (1819) at “King” George Washington.

In the postcolonial American novels—as in the colonial and postcolonial Mexican and Latin American novels described by Anderson and Sommer—it is the role of the picaro/picara to keep moving as a way to evade the repressive operations of government but also individualist actions by those outside of government. It’s a toss-up, really, between American mobocracy and autocracy. A very interesting case is Herman Mann’s The Female Review (1797), loosely based on the story of Deborah Sampson, a young woman who cross-dressed as a man in order to fight in the Revolutionary War. In this novel, Deborah Sampson fears sexual exposure (and military demotion) every bit as much as she fears the Revolutionary War itself. Mann turns an incident in Revolutionary War history into a fascinating metaphor for the psychological violence of being a woman in the new Republic. She is free, handsome, even swashbuckling in drag, and she protects her false identity in order to hold on to the fiction of her freedom.⁴⁴ And part of the appeal of the best-selling American novel before the publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Susanna Rowson’s Charlotte Temple (1791), is that its domestic tribulations are set against the backdrop of the American Revolution and its heroine is equally vulnerable in the Old Country and in the New. Seduced in England, impregnated on the passage over, and abandoned to die alone and penniless in America, Charlotte Temple is the archetypal postcolonial heroine. Her fate is an object lesson (albeit a negative one) in separation from parental authority and the requirements for both independence and survival.

Since Anderson, postcolonial studies, and particularly those focusing on nation building, have gone in many productive directions. Among them are comparative Americas studies (inter-American studies, hemispheric studies, circum-Atlantic studies, Pacific Rim studies), a rich area that highlights the different traditions within the Americas as well as interconnections between the Americas and other parts of the globe.⁴⁵ Understanding the processes of nation building in various countries throughout the Caribbean and the Americas helps us to understand which formations are typical and which site-specific. It also helps to counterbalance clichés about the “national character” and sort out the local from the universal.

I’ve learned especially from postcolonial studies to focus on indigenous voices and to make discriminations among the kinds of cultural productions within postcolonial societies, including multiply voiced forms of dissent, heterogeneous populations both within those colonizing and those colonized, and multiple meanings within the culture of the postcolonial state that carry the traces of those diverse populations. Their particular relevance to Revolution and the Word is in the way they shed light on mutually constitutive conditions of colonialism. The new United States was susceptible both to influences from European high culture and to what Mignolo calls “globalization from below”—the impact of the cultures and values of indigenous peoples as well as those who were brought by force or circumstance to the New World (slaves, indentured servants, political outcasts, the rural and urban poor, etc.).

The interplay of these diverse traditions created an “America” far more complex than we know from popular history. Another example from John Adams is useful. Adams, it will be recalled, was the attorney who defended the British soldiers who fired upon and killed five civilians in the Boston Massacre. In court, he argued that the British soldiers were justified in what they did because they were attacked not by respectable Americans but by an unruly and unrespectable mob led by Crispus Attucks (who was part African and part Native American). In Adams’s memorable phrase, they were “a motley rabble of saucy boys, Negroes and mulattoes, Irish teagues and outlandish jacktars.”⁴⁶ Six of the British soldiers who had fired upon the crowd were acquitted; the other two were found guilty of manslaughter. Their punishment was to be branded on their thumbs, and this miscarriage of justice became fodder for those seeking independence from England. Adams’s role is not often remembered on patriotic occasions. And it is significant that history has “whitened up” the patriots who died during the Boston Massacre. It makes them New Englanders, even “Puritans,” not multicultural, multinational dock workers in a system of global trade in which capital, goods, and human beings were exchanged. Postcolonial theory helps us to attend to different parts of this particular story—the attorney turned patriot turned Federalist president, the translation of a multiracial mob into storybook (white) American heroes that reinforces later discrimination against people of color. America was one destination on worldwide colonial trading circuits. Think about the Boston Tea Party. From where was that tea coming? Obviously from India, China, or Japan. What else was coming from those other ports on the colonial trading circuits?

In the years after the American Revolution, America began creating the unified myth of itself. Many have argued, however, that “myth” is the operative word in that equation. The early novel provides us with scraps that have not been homogenized by heroic histories. Rural, scattered, a nation of immigrants with different cultural and religious traditions, with poverty and homelessness, pestilence, and slavery, with vitriolic party politics as well as political corruption, with mobocracy and would-be aristocracy, and very little in the way of high culture, America had no urban center of population, power, and culture equivalent to London or Paris. America started in part as a refuge for English Puritans seeking a place to practice their religion without persecution. That’s one part of the story. The other story is of thirteen dissimilar colonies and various territories representing different religious, ethnic, and linguistic traditions (German, French, Spanish, etc.). Some, but not all, of these were yoked together in a revolution against imperial England. Some, but not all, emerged as a small, shaky, contentious, and hybrid nation—part of a world system of global trading and colonization whose foundation was genocide and displacement of indigenous populations, piracy, indentured servitude, and enforced slavery. It is a story of a fledgling nation whose leaders often expressed insecurity and inferiority relative to the cultural and political hegemony of Europe (chiefly England) and superiority relative to the rest of the Americas (especially, but not exclusively, those portions that were predominantly nonwhite and non-British—the Caribbean and Central and South America). Revolutions, wars, slave revolts, and border disputes (such as the War of 1812 with Canada) caused anxieties.⁴⁷ An unstable world position became a powerful driver in shaping American ideology, including one that homogenized and unified America’s story. Postcolonial theory helps us resuscitate a repressed America.

A Paradigm Shift: Subversion

If the absence of the word “postcolonial” in the index of Revolution and the Word reminds us that it was written in the 1970s and early 1980s, the intermittent presence of the word “subversion” similarly marks its time. That word, so prominent in the work of Michel Foucault as well as in the work of New Historicists, struck a chord with me as I tried to describe the novel’s role in the early Republic.⁴⁸ In places, I argue that the novel undercut the status quo, providing a subversive voice in the nation.

In retrospect, subversion seems like a narrow way to describe the complex operations of the literary form in the contest over how to define and create that amorphous entity called a “nation.” “Subversion” implies an undermining of something that is solid, fixed, overarching. It is a binary configuration: the novel versus the Founding Fathers (to put it in its most black-and-white formulation). Yet, as I argue in this new introduction, most of the individuals who wrote novels thought of themselves as patriots contributing to and improving the new nation, not subverting it. Susanna Rowson, for example, saw herself as part of a larger project of enfranchisement, inclusive in the audience she addressed in her novels, plays, histories, and textbooks (demographies of readers who were often outside the official political process). “Symbolic enfranchisement” might be a better description of Rowson’s ambitions than “subversion.” The novel did not operate outside the nation but had a powerful formative impact on what was in the process of solidifying itself into a nation.

While that understanding of the novel’s cultural role is dominant in Revolution and the Word, the more narrow “subversive” role is also intermittently present. Rereading at this distance, I would have to say that the models of power and influence I used in Revolution and the Word are inconsistent. This is partly because those models themselves were in flux at the time I was writing. The concept of subversion was being tested and debated. Can one subvert a nation and be part of the nation at the same time? What and who constitute “the nation”? Although I was not aware of it then, I had not fully resolved for myself the role of oppositionality within a culture.

Because Revolution and the Word was the first theoretical analysis of the early American novel, its paradigms became those against which other critics had to set their own theories, both of the novel and of the public sphere in the early national period.⁴⁹ And because “subversion” remained such a powerful construct throughout the mid-1980s and well into the 1990s, many critics defined their view of the novel as “more subversive” or “less subversive” than Revolution and the Word supposed.⁵⁰ These debates have been vigorous and significant, and have led to a clarification of the political dimensions of fiction.⁵¹ Without the dialogue generated by these critics and the generous attentions they have paid to my work, I could not and would not be introducing this expanded edition of Revolution and the Word. At the same time, I admit that there are times in rereading Revolution and the Word and subsequent scholarship on the early American novels when I feel as if I’m at a gymnastic competition where the judges award or withhold points to early American novels based on the degree and dexterity of their subversion.

I have learned a tremendous amount from a post-Foucauldian generation of scholars who assess in a more nuanced way the dimensions of power and power relations, especially relationships between dominant and marginalized groups, between culture and subcultures.⁵² To describe the novel as “subversive” carries with it the baggage of perfect authorial intentionality (mounting almost to omnipotence) as well as the misplaced idea that a novel (or any cultural form) is somehow outside and apart from the very forces that contribute to its creation and to which it contributes. Subversive of what? How do we extricate the multiple, convoluted, and inconsistent strands of protest, acquiescence, acceptance, resistance, coercion, cooptation, complicity, privilege, exclusion, and domination? Lora Romero’s remarkable book Home Fronts: Domesticity and Its Critics in the Antebellum United States articulates some of the pitfalls of a binaristic model of power. She uses the example of gender and sentimentalism to address models of cultural power:

The figure of the domestic woman has haunted us for over two centuries because of her utility for overstabilizing the analytic terms “ideology” and “opposition.” No matter which side of the binarism contemporary criticism places her on, she still serves the same purpose she serves in domesticity itself: defining (either through her presence or renunciation) a literary space insulated from politics. The nineteenth century called this place “home.” We call it either “high culture” or “the margins.” And if we characterize a high cultural or a marginal literary tradition as “political,” we mean only that it resists or demystifies some ideological construct external to it.… These debates proceed from the assumption that culture either frees or enslaves. There appear to be no other choices. We seem unable to entertain the possibility that traditions, or even individual texts, could be radical on some issues (market capitalism, for example) and reactionary on others (gender or race, for instance). Or that some discourses could be oppositional without being outright liberating. Or conservative without being outright enslaving.… If, following Foucault, we view hegemony not as a monolithic “structure” radiating from a single source but instead a web of “non-egalitarian and mobile” power relations, then we can better understand the incommensurability of political visions represented in early nineteenth-century texts—and perhaps temper our disappointment when we realize that authors have not done the impossible, that is, discovered the one key for the liberation of all humankind.⁵³

This complicated notion of cultural work presents a less didactic model for the impact and responsibility of writers on the process of social change than I, at some points, advocate in the original preface and introduction to Revolution and the Word.

Romero’s formulation reminds us that we do not have to praise or condemn a given writer or genre that isn’t oppositional (“subversive”) enough. Opposition is part of, contiguous with, and a contributor to “culture.” Opposition cannot be outside of culture, nor can writers (or anyone else). For Romero, it is not the job of the critic to find instances of subversion or complicity since power relations themselves are always mobile. This formulation frees us from what Paul Ricoeur calls a “hermeneutics of suspicion” by which every action gets parsed out for its presumed political impurities. Other critics have also provided healthier models for criticism than the “subversive” or “oppositional.”⁵⁴ Without belaboring this point, I point to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s brilliant essay “Paranoid Reading, Reparative Reading,” which argues against paranoid reading practices that are ultimately both self-fulfilling and self-defeating.⁵⁵

Sedgwick proposes a generous way of reading without giving up on the importance of political resistance. Similarly, my rethinking of “subversion” as a category is in no way a capitulation to those (Walter Benn Michaels is the primary example) who insist that nothing, after all, can ever be subversive. In several essays and books, Michaels has made variations on a theme: Those who criticize racism are elevating “race” to a category and are therefore (by definition, if unwittingly) racists themselves.⁵⁶ It’s an argument whose main goal is provocation. It is a style of argument that is designed to stir more argument, to create the proverbial tempest in a teapot. Michaels evacuates the content and passion of dissent. He argues primarily from the form of anti-racist discourse, then generalizes and applies the same reductive formula to other scholarship that addresses gender, class, colonialism, and so forth. His premises are confused and sometimes even obfuscating, the logic leading to another typically tendentious conclusion. By reducing syllogism to tautology, Michaels begs the questions others strive to understand.

If subversion doesn’t work as a category of analysis, neither does sophistry. If subversion has shortcomings as an action plan, it beats apathy. In some ways, I admit that I still value the affective role that words such as “subversion” and “opposition” perform since they insistently evoke a different tradition from the one of compromise and moderation that I have addressed earlier in this introduction and that, as I have emphasized, contribute to a complacent national history. For all the inherent theoretical contradictions and flaws in parsing out dissident elements of a culture whose ultimate shape has to be some articulation of all its elements, including the dissident, there is a power to resistance that I’m not prepared to give away. Like faith or even faith healing, oppositionality may well have a placebo effect. Yet who’s to argue with the result if a placebo enacts productive and positive change?

Protest need not (and maybe should not) be logical but expressive and performative. The desire to change, disrupt, or even destroy aspects of one’s society that one sees as immoral and intolerable is, after all, one impulse that structures a culture. The desire to move outside of one’s culture deserves validation—so long as one accepts that the desire does not (and cannot) move the subject outside of his or her culture. And on certain occasions, these powerful desires do serve to fragment or even restructure a culture. For many, these bottom-line convictions inform the way we read our world.⁵⁷ The desire itself is cathartic and sometimes transformative. The ability to stir affect into action (individual or collective) has been a particular function of the artist not only in Western society but in many of the world’s societies. I want to hold on to Melville’s famously pure negation—“Saying ‘no’ in thunder!” It is the ultimate clarion call for writers, intellectuals, and anyone else who does not feel cozy within the State one cannot avoid inhabiting.

Sometimes I try to imagine what it must have been like living in postrevolutionary America, a thought experiment that, I realize, is ultimately a projection of my own lived condition in 2004 as much as it is a statement about the 1780s. History has preserved relatively little about Shays and his fellow farmers since part of the project of nation building is to exaggerate solidarity and downplay dissent.⁵⁸ It takes a leap of imagination to understand the levels of betrayal and disappointment experienced by those nine thousand desperate and destitute Massachusetts farmers in 1787 who marched on Springfield, Massachusetts. Most of them were veterans who left the army with worthless government certificates only to return to war-ravaged farms, harsh taxes, and the threat of debtor’s prison. They staged a rebellion of their own, with the heroic battle cries of the Revolution (“No taxation without representation!”) still ringing in their ears, led by Daniel Shays, who had fought in the battles of Lexington, Bunker Hill, Saratoga, and Stony Point. One of the insurgents wrote, “I earnestly stepped forth in defense of this country, and liberty is still the object I have in view.”

However, the officials in the new government did not agree. Governor James Bowdoin (the same man who defended Perez Morton, portrayed as the evil seducer “Martin” in The Power of Sympathy) joined with other Boston merchants who put up their own money to fund an army to attack the rebels. They stopped them at the government arsenal. Cannons killed four of the rebels and wounded twenty others. The rebels had never dreamed that they would be attacked by their fellow veterans. They retreated in horror, disarray, and bitter disillusionment. The former revolutionary Samuel Adams pronounced that while of course it had been fine to rebel against a king, anyone who “dares to rebel against the laws of a republic ought to suffer death.” Shays himself escaped into Vermont (which was not then part of the union), but two hundred others were charged with treason. In April 1787, five of them were condemned to be hanged. Although Bowdoin was defeated in the intervening election, his successor, John Hancock, had to face the same problem of what to do with the rebels. His solution was to bring them to the gallows for public execution—and then reprieve them at the last moment.⁵⁹ What better example of the symbolics of governmental authority (in Foucault’s sense) than this public exhibition of the “merciful” state granting a pardon to convicted rebels against the state?

Maybe “strategic subversion” has the same pitfalls as “strategic essentialism” as a philosophical category, but it should nonetheless be obvious that Daniel Shays and his rebels were doing something in opposition to the officially constituted government of the new nation. Popular history conjoins winning the Revolutionary War and ratifying the Constitution into one continuous and glorious moment, erasing what came between, minimizing the disparate voices, quieting dissent. Popular history ignores those “men and women who had to cope with a revolution that had failed them, one which in their judgment had merely shifted power from one set of ‘plunderers’ to another.”⁶⁰ Local forms of popular culture (foremost, the novel) are one place where we find articulations of the inequality, poverty, disenfranchisement, abandonment, and betrayal lingering in a new nation.

Whatever the explicit political position of their authors, the novels in the early Republic assayed the social terrain of beggar maids, the rural poor, illiterate immigrants, indentured servants, slaves, spinsters, fallen women, unwed mothers, star-crossed lovers, wanton soldiers, cross-dressing soldiers, skilled artisans, itinerant laborers, female adventurers, brave explorers, schoolteachers, midwives, corrupt evangelists, devious aristocrats, corrupt politicians, wayward youths, stoic breadwinners, fierce matriarchs, pious ministers, angry mobs, devout pilgrims, heartsick lovers, seducers, suicides, prostitutes, pirates, proud Indians, entrepreneurial Irishmen, sympathetic Jews, wise mullahs, captives, confidence men, hucksters, even Catholics: a different constellation of “We the People.”

Gender and Sexuality Studies

Revolution and the Word was researched, written, and published in the midst of an astonishing flourishing of feminist history, criticism, and literary theory. Americanists in particular were producing work of enormous range, depth, inventiveness, and profundity that would change forever the constructs by which future generations of scholars would view American culture and politics. Or so it was thought. In fact, in some contemporary books, one would think that the critical and social revolution often dubbed “Seventies Feminism” had never happened at all. Yet in other books (most often by either virulent antifeminists or by later generations of feminists) one would think that “Seventies Feminism” was something like a Satanic cult that had forever corrupted the minds of historians and literary critics.

I have put the term “Seventies Feminism” in quotation marks to signal that its existence in contemporary criticism is more monolithic than it was at the time. That said, however, I need to be clear that I wrote Revolution and the Word partly in reaction against aspects of “Seventies Feminism” that I found to be reductive—even though there would have been no Revolution and the Word without “Seventies Feminism.” I wanted to understand everything I could about the role of the novel in the creation of the new Republic. That, to me, meant also analyzing the role of women in the creation of the American novel—as writers, readers, educators, and social critics. In this regard, my project was consonant with other feminist work of its day.

However, the more I read novels, newspapers, tracts, and private sources (such as letters and diaries), the less I was convinced that gender was the defining category of identity in the new Republic or, indeed, that any one category of identity trumped all the others. The attempt to factor gender into the analysis of the early American novel had a special weight given the tradition, since James Fenimore Cooper, of suggesting that serious writers were being drowned out by popular sentimental writers and that those terms were coded “male” and “female,” respectively. My research persuaded me that those codes and equations were slippery and often false. Not all eighteenth-and nineteenth-century popular novels were sentimental; not all sentimental novels were popular; not all sentimental fiction was written or read by women. I discovered that all the material evidence available—extant lending-library rosters, subscription lists published in novels, and inscriptions found in extant copies of novels—suggested that men as well as women read even the most sentimental books.

Methodologically, my interest in documenting the readership of the early American novel as well as finding out more about early American writers led to a theoretical quandary. Given the weight of evidence, research, archives, and generalizations about male readers and writers—as well as the burdensome clichés about women—to amass the amount of evidence necessary to refute the existing paradigms necessitated particularly energetic research to create and analyze a women’s archive. As with a seesaw where all the weight is on one side, it took a considerable effort to weight the opposite side enough for balance. Yet how does one present so much evidence without tilting in the opposite direction and seemingly writing a book about women—especially when that is exactly the kind of gender segregation one has set out to dispel? There is no resolution to this quandary. In any cultural narrative, more “back story” is required to displace a generalization and to fill a gap than to support existing paradigms.

Revolution and the Word has much to say about women readers. Yet it is not a book only about women. And, despite its attention to women, one of its convictions is that the “separate spheres” view of American culture attributed to the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries did not operate consistently in the world of early American fiction.⁶¹ Revolution and the Word was both part of the new feminist historiography of the early and mid-1980s and partly inspired by my disagreement with some feminist critics who focused on women but who may not have been as interested in the contiguous topics of gender and gender relations.

Indeed, like “postcolonial,” the word “gender” is not in the index of Revolution and the Word. Gender was not yet a key term in the feminist debates but evolved, largely in the late 1980s, in reaction to discussions of “woman” and “women” that assumed as universal gender attributes that were race- or class-specific or that were tacitly based on a normative heterosexuality. As with “subversion,” “feminism” in 1986 was a term that was being debated with seriousness and rigor—especially by scholars who defined themselves as feminists. The word “gender” helped make a crucial distinction between that which was thought to be biologically female and the range of cultural and social characteristics ascribed to those who were biologically female. A range of other terms debated in the 1970s and 1980s (such as “domesticity” or “sentimentalism”) carried excess cultural baggage precisely because of the myriad levels of confusion between the biological and cultural.

My charge in Revolution and the Word was to try to parse out (and maybe even straighten out) one part of this confusing debate. I was concerned with distinguishing the sentimental origins of the American novel from those origins that were not in the sentimental tradition—and to see both in relationship to the reading habits of women and men (mostly white, but not all middle class by any means). I was also attempting to understand the role that women as well as men played in the creation of the novel genre as writers, readers, printers (rarely female), cultural arbiters, educators, or proprietors of lending libraries. True, the American novel began with a sentimental novel, The Power of Sympathy. What does it mean that The Power of Sympathy was written by a man, not a woman? Its publishing history is itself an allegory in gender theory. Published anonymously, The Power of Sympathy was attributed throughout much of the nineteenth century to a female author. Why? No doubt because it is dedicated to the “young ladies of United Columbia,” because women characters play significant roles in the plot, and because sympathy and sentimentalism, over the course of the next century, were increasingly considered “female” (even though many nineteenth-century male writers—including Hawthorne and Melville on occasion—penned works that must be considered sentimental). That complex gender history is partly what makes The Power of Sympathy a fascinating beginning for American fiction and one that already complicates traditional gender bifurcations (male/ political/public sphere v. female/sentimental/domestic sphere). Although some nineteenth-century commentators (although not as many as some late-twentieth-century feminist critics insist) divided the world into “separate spheres,” there were always women and men who operated between, among, around, and outside of those spheres. As I have argued at length elsewhere, the spheres overlapped (again one thinks of a Venn diagram), but they were also irrelevant to masses of working-class women and men, to many African Americans (who continued to use the affective power of sentimentalism in slave narratives), immigrants, and many others.⁶²

In certain instances, identification by gender and gender alone made a difference in women’s experience. This was true in a number of biological areas (menses, childbirth, menopause) and in a number of legal areas (women—all women, regardless of age, economic status, race, or other factors—could not vote in early America). However, the range of behaviors, attitudes, stereotypes, and prejudices within even these gender-determined areas varies radically because of several other factors. Equally important, the egalitarian (or “feminist”) response to socially and legally prescribed gender roles was as varied as the roles themselves, which is precisely why the novel was the perfect genre to portray a range of behaviors of women and men within a non-egalitarian legal system.

Illicit heterosexual behaviors were a favorite topic of early American novelists. Desire and destiny were interwoven in fascinating ways, with communities of men and women serving complex regulatory roles (as advisors, critics, and goads) within the world of sexual attraction and exchange. Intriguingly, the nuances and complexities of these sexual encounters varied greatly in their performance but typically ended in the solitary death of the heroine in childbirth. And here it didn’t matter whether the women were penniless adolescents such as the hapless Charlotte Temple or educated, capable, middle-class women such as Eliza Wharton. I tend to see death-in-childbirth in narrative terms and also in philosophical terms as an expression of the ultimate frustration of eighteenth-century writers when it came to envisioning alternative models of female sexual expression and behavior.⁶³

Every woman’s movement from the late eighteenth century to the present has had to face the same contradiction between demanding equal legal or legislative treatment and advocating special consideration. Insisting that laws be changed, for example, to grant women the right to vote presumes that women are equal to men and that equal opportunity will rectify the past discrimination. However, the argument for special consideration implies that a long history of unequal opportunity (such as women not being admitted to colleges in the eighteenth century) necessarily means that women are less prepared than men for these equal opportunities. Activists who stress the need for special privileges emphasize the necessity for remedial training to compensate for a history of inequality. Special programs designed to encourage young girls to study math are one example of compensatory feminism. Some critics of feminism insist the movement is contradictory because of these two quite divergent philosophies that address the same problem of how female equality might be achieved.

I contend that this Catch-22, while applied in this case to women, has also been applicable over time to various minority groups seeking a voice within the political system as well as for colonized peoples seeking independence. “Equality” is a very difficult term to pin down. Different feminists have fought for a different range of rights and privileges based on different ranges of values—from “fairness” to “redress.” Because of these differences, feminists have often been accused of being contradictory. What do women want? The answer varies with the circumstance and the specificities of the particular individual or group of women involved.

Most recently, the debates over affirmative action policies have conflated different ideas of equity. It might be useful here to unpack one strand of that controversy in order to understand the social, cultural, and economic content hidden in the seemingly straightforward notions of “equality.” Briefly, universities have decided that racial diversity is one of many different kinds of diversity that are important to the collective social and educational experience for which students pay tuition. However, we know from past experience that if seemingly “equal” selection criteria are applied to all applicants, racial diversity is not always possible. This is because the seemingly objective measure of achievement scores (the baseline of “equal” admissions) is not objective at all but changes depending upon one’s degree of preparation. One can even pay to take expensive crash-courses in how to take these tests, with higher test scores the promised (and statistically valid) result of finishing the course. Since black Americans live disproportionately in poverty and attend schools that are substandard, there is no way that their educational preparation ensures success on standard-ized tests (since the standard itself is based on a norm of educational achievement at American secondary schools). Equal admissions standards, given this complex history, yield inequal results that reflect and perpetuate inequalities in the larger society. “Race blind,” when we unpack this history, is thus discriminatory or racist.

Why unpacking this affirmative action argument is useful in this context is because it shows how many assumptions about our culture are embedded in seemingly simple words. “Feminism” is one of those words that can mean so many things to so many people precisely because it carries centuries of divergent meanings. “Identity” is another such term. Since the publication of Revolution and the Word, dozens of important theorists have worked to understand the complexities of the identity terms we use casually and constantly in our everyday lives and in our scholarship. Different scholars have found a range of ways to negotiate between theories and applications, identity and acts, expression and performance (terms parsed with particular philosophical rigor in Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble). “Essentialism,” “antiessentialism,” and “strategic essentialism” are all terms that work to differentiate between an identity category and the hidden assumptions embedded in that category. The importance of making or not making certain differentiations has been argued by critics such as Diana Fuss, Naomi Shor, Gayatri Spivak, and others. “Agency” and “affect” have both become central to these discussions. To test theories of universalism or foundationalism, some gender critics have insisted we need specificity and concentration on the local, while others (and I think particularly of Caren Kaplan and Inderpal Grewal) have insisted on the transnational. Gender critics have productively employed and deconstructed epistemological, ontological, psychological, psychoanalytic (Freud and Lacan as well as Julia Kristeva and other French feminists), sociological, and other disciplinary discourses and traditions while, even more recently, the critic Ranjana Khanna has used deconstructive methodologies of attentive and skeptical close reading to explore the tension between psychoanalytic assumptions and postcolonial conditions.⁶⁴

It would be ludicrous to attempt to summarize in a few pages some of the most important feminist criticism of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. Instead, I want to highlight two different ways of thinking about gender that go further than I did in 1986 to complicate the paradigms of unequal power. The first requires attending to multiple categories of identity at once and being attuned to the ways that a single person can move in and out of positions of power in different contexts. The categories, in other words, are not fixed, and, in one instance, personal wealth may have a greater impact than gender. In another, the privileges of whiteness may outweigh the limitations of gender. In still others, being a black female might be very different from being a white female. In each of these instances, the word “woman” can be significant or insignificant—and differently so in different circumstances.

To acknowledge the range of applications and significations of identity is by no means to evacuate the category of its power. Quite the contrary. I continue to argue that identity politics as a governing principle was central to the creation of the new nation and to its perpetuation. Citizenship, responsibilities, and rights have all been based on principles of inclusion or exclusion rooted in the blatant equation between “personhood” and such defining characteristics of identity as race or whether one was biologically male or female. Take, as a signal instance, voting rights. Who could and who could not vote in American history has been rooted, fundamentally and foundationally, in identity politics as legislated by the U.S. Constitution and upheld by the Supreme Court of the United States. It was only in the wake of the Civil War and the 1870 ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution that “the right to vote shall not be denied or abridged on the basis of race, color or previous condition of servitude.” However, by 1876, two decisions by the Supreme Court—the Enforcement Act and the Force Act—severely limited the scope of the Fifteenth Amendment by removing federal troops that protected black voters in the South and by allowing states to enact fraudulent means—poll taxes, literacy tests, vouchers of “good character,” and grandfather clauses (that allowed one to vote only if one’s grandfather could)—to disenfranchise blacks again. By 1910, there was de facto disenfranchisement of nearly all black citizens in the South and virtually all black legislators had been removed from office. This did not change until passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

Identity politics was equally at work for women. It was not until 1920 that female citizens (of any race) were enfranchised. For Asian American men and women, citizenship was also denied on the basis of identity until the 1943 repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Acts and the 1952 passage of the McCarran-Walters Act nullifying the racially exclusive language of the 1790 Act of the federal Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration, which restricted naturalization to “free, white person(s).” Further, a genealogy of Asian American voting rights might be extended to 1964, when racist restrictions on “Asian” immigration embedded in the Immigration and Naturalization Service quota system were removed. Finally, the right of U.S. citizenship (including the right to vote) was extended to Native Americans only in 1924. And, in cases similar to those in the Jim Crow South, many states instituted restrictions on or obstacles to voting for Native Americans that were upheld until challenged by a major lawsuit in 1947. It was not until 1975 that protections secured by the Voting Rights Acts were extended to Native Americans. In a representative democracy, that certain Americans were excluded from electoral representation because of gender, race, or national origin is identity politics (long before that phrase itself was coined). To say so is not just “politically correct” (another buzzword of the late twentieth century). It is historically accurate.⁶⁵

The thirteen essays included in No More Separate Spheres! (a 2002 collection of essays that I coedited with Jessamyn Hatcher) represent different ways that feminist literary critics have complicated gender as a category of identity by taking into account other categories, including race, sexuality, class, region, and nationality. Amy Kaplan, for example, shows the ways white middle-class and upperclass women encouraged and enjoyed the fruits of imperialism in the first half of the nineteenth century by identifying their “femaleness” as part of the operation of “civilizing” power. She has coined the term “manifest domesticity” to underline the role these women played in support of “domestic policies” (values within the white middle-class home that reflected those values within the nation) that led to the subjugation of other nations, policies that also played out in the middle-class U.S. home where feminine virtue itself was defined in contrast to the “uncivilized” and non white populations both at home and abroad. You-me Park and Gayle Wald deconstruct the “cult of domesticity” by attending to class and race. They show how differently domesticity signifies for the working-class women of color who clean the homes of middle-class women (of any race). “Working outside the home” takes on an ironic cast when one’s work is tending someone else’s home. Park and Wald destabilize the idea that the home is the sphere of “women” by examining the multiple forms of female labor required to support the bourgeois home. The educational training of immigrant girls as well as African American and Native American girls in the values of bourgeois domesticity enhanced their market value as domestics. In each of these essays, the focus isn’t on “women” so much as the particular circumstances, limitations, and privileges enjoyed by certain women. Park and Wald replace “woman” as a category by asking “Which women?” When, why, and by what social and economic forces is such a sphere maintained, sustained, and retained?⁶⁶

In Revolution and the Word, I argue that the didacticism of early American fiction was often aimed at improving social and legal conditions for women, but many of the same novels could also be critical of middle-class women for not taking their social responsibilities seriously enough. If men are sometimes cruel to women, so are women, a subtle way of complicating gender stereotypes. In addition, a number of the novels that advocated improved female education also addressed a range of “public” topics such as representative democracy, religious tyranny or hypocrisy, poor laws, the institution of slavery, unfair taxation, imitation of European fashions, the responsibilities of elected officials, immigration, military and maritime authority, and other controversies that dominated political discussion of the time. In other words, the novels may be “about” women—but women are about many things.

Gender is one of many subjects Revolution and the Word works to complicate by redefining what and who constituted the postrevolutionary public sphere. I argue that the novel—like newspapers, tracts, advice books, primers, poetic epics, and other forms of print culture—participated in the public sphere not only by extending the discussion of political and social problems to those who were not “at the table” as laws and policies were being formalized but also by translating the implications of the Declaration of Independence, Articles of Confederation, or Bill of Rights into everyday life situations. Novels challenged the very distinction between “private” and “public” life.

A second line of analysis out of gender studies that I find productive for reframing Revolution and the Word for a new generation of readers is the emphasis on pleasure, freedom, and mobility enjoyed even by those in circumstances that would seemingly preclude anything positive at all. Amid the palpable bitterness of tending someone else’s house is there also a vicarious appreciation of luxury that well might be pleasurable and even empowering? If the choices are between factory work or domestic labor, are there emotional bonuses that come from recognizing one’s own capability relative to the incapacities of the upper-class person who has gained her station due to inherited or marital wealth? What is the dividing line between her station and yours? Writers as diverse as Edith Wharton, Alice Childress, and Toni Morrison have all explored these topics—the upward mobility of the domestic worker as an inverted mirror of the precarious (and often joyless) wealth of the middle-class married woman. What, as scholars and readers, do we gain by coupling our training in critical thinking (in the sense of being quick to assay the negative, the powerless, the embattled) with sensitivity to pleasures obtainable even in the grimmest of worlds? Hard-won pleasures (Charlotte Temple’s brief comfort by the fire, Eliza Wharton’s eyes shining with freedom and triumph, however temporary) may, however, allow the reader to take away a more inspiring (and less depressing) message. Finding tidbits of optimism does not mean one is insensitive to oppression. On the contrary, operational optimism may well be a better spur to activism than is relentless critique. All of these possibilities have been explored by a range of critics interested in the powers of pleasure and the pleasure of power. In the succinct formulation of Robert Blair St. George, “power is creative as well as coercive.”⁶⁷

In Revolution and the Word, there are many places where I focus on women’s pleasures—including the delicious pleasure of reading, the delight in education, and the joy of female friendship. Revolution and the Word was among the first books to attribute agency both to female protagonists (they are not simply passive in the face of men) and to the female reader (who could take away from the plot an inspiration to personal strength and power). However, in the last edition of Revolution and the Word my general view of the political and legal situation of women in the early Republic was relatively bleak. I tended to see the bad end of so many seduction novels as exemplifying the sense that there was “no way out” for the Republican woman.

While in no way denying the limited legal status and circumscribed political role of women in the new Republic, I am now inclined to view women in the postrevolutionary period as less confined than I held in 1986. I am persuaded by critics such as Christopher Castiglia that there are other ways of seeing agency, even in extremely restrictive settings. Castiglia looks for examples of women who are actors and agents despite what seem insuperable obstacles. He pays particular attention to the narratives of white women captured by Indians (who had typically been interpreted as the most passive victims) and sees the release from the demands of white female domesticity as liberating. He uses these examples of agency to show that, even in a society where legal and political definitions of women are severely constrained, women find ways to become social actors. His emphasis on women’s abilities to imaginatively “transcend their captivities” applies to the heroines of seduction novels as well and is a good corrective to a more bleak definition of postrevolutionary women.⁶⁸

Building on Castiglia, I would now posit a different way of seeing the fatal endings (such as the death in childbirth) of so many late-eighteenth-century novels. Revolution and the Word follows Fredric Jameson’s work in understanding the ideological potentials of the novel as a genre. If the convention of the seduction novel genre is an unhappy ending, then one could say that it is the unhappy ending itself that permits the exploration of desire—like the corpse in a mystery novel: without it, there’s no motivation for the plot. If the reader is forewarned by a dedication (The Power of Sympathy promises to “expose the fatal consequences of seduction”) and knows the unhappy ending in advance, then that ending is pro forma—so expected—that one can ignore it, simply enjoying the unfolding plot, which is, after all, about a woman indulging her desires.

I like the idea that eighteenth-century readers understood that there was no way a novelist could explore female sexuality without expressing disapproval in the end. The preface and the last three or four pages of the novel provided enough moral improvement that the reader could enjoy the intervening two hundred pages guiltlessly. Seduction novels are fixated on female sexual expression—as every critic of the novel knew full well. I am suggesting that the fixity gave writer and reader alike narrative mobility. In other words, accepting the discourse conventions of an unhappy ending allowed the reader to indulge a guilty pleasure. There was freedom in the pro forma.

Were I to rewrite Revolution and the Word today, enriched by fifteen years of subsequent analysis of gender and sexuality studies, I would also pay more attention to the subtle ways that female-ness is transformed by class and race affiliations as well as by sexuality. Same-sex desire and homosociality are two rich areas still inviting more attention from scholars of early American fiction. Surprisingly, there has still not been enough analysis to date of the ways that the hostile heterosexual world encouraged a fertile world of female homosociality.⁶⁹ And there is certainly plenty of material. Cross-dressing novels such as Herman Mann’s The Female Review (1797, mentioned earlier), which fictionalizes the reallife adventures of the soldier Deborah Sampson in the Revolutionary War, or the more picaresque tales of war-tossed, star-crossed lovers such as the anonymous History of Constantius and Pulchera (1794) become especially interesting in view of queer theory.⁷⁰ Both books need to be reread in light of excellent studies of female masculinity by scholars such as Judith Halberstam. Inevitably, the women-posing-as-men are universal sex objects, their cross-dressing proving to be an aphrodisiac to both male and female suitors. For there is no “opposite sex” for the cross-dressers—there’s just sex!⁷¹ Virtually all of Charles Brockden Brown’s work, beginning with Alcuin (1798), deserves rereading in light of queer theory.⁷² Many of his plots, rooted as they are in both sentimental and gothic fictional traditions, enact the rituals, codes, permissions, and prohibitions operating, in Sedgwick’s evocative phrase, “between men.”⁷³

Libido runs high (for women and men) in these tales of cross-dressing. But then “running high” is what these novels are about. In these fantasies, the cross-dressing women enjoy physical adventures, make autonomous decisions, and act boldly and heroically. They travel. They fight. They love. And they are able to do so because they can pass as men. These are fantasies of freedom—with a set of men’s clothes and a handsome swagger providing the passport to new adventures. At the end of these novels, the heroine typically returns to women’s dress and sometimes even to marriage ever after. Yet the return to femaleness in the cross-dressing novels may well be as pro forma as the death-in-childbirth ending. The cross-dressing adventures (and not their termination) are what we read for. That’s the fun and the freedom. The ending is, for what it is worth, all too conventional.

Race Studies

I wrote Revolution and the Word when race studies were at a vibrant, even heady, moment. Major work by Houston A. Baker, Jr., Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Arnold Rampersad had either recently appeared or was being presented as papers at scholarly conferences, ensuring that African American literature would be both part of both the Americanist literary canon and an important subject with which literary theorists had to grapple.⁷⁴ There was enough excitement and maturity for debate. Sessions on black studies at meetings of the Modern Language Association were packed with hundreds of scholars learning a new literary history. The debates were especially trenchant when black feminist critics, including Hazel Carby, Gloria Hull, Deborah McDowell, bell hooks, and others, were at the podium to ensure that African American women writers were part of the interpretation of American and African American literature.⁷⁵

Most of the work on race written in the decade when I was researching and writing Revolution and the Word focused on writers of color (creating a new canon), on images of African Americans in white-authored texts, or on the history and impact of slavery. Revolution and the Word was a product of its time in its emphasis on these aspects of race as well. In addition, in the late 1970s and 1980s, race studies typically meant black studies. At the time, few early black writers had been “discovered” except for poet Phillis Wheatley and the former slave Olaudah Equiano, so there was not yet a significant group of critics working on race in the early national period.

To date, we still do not know of any black-authored early American novels, although the canon of early black literature, especially of the Black Atlantic, has expanded significantly, with many critics specializing in this area, many texts now available, and significant controversies (always a sign of health) in the field.⁷⁶ Brilliant analyses of race in the last decade by critics such as Paul Gilroy, Wahneema Lubiano, and Robin Kelley (in a parallel fashion to work on gender) have also made more visible the ramifications of a system based on race in the entire social fabric of nationhood and nationalist ideology.⁷⁷

Although it was still too early in the history of critical race studies to be able to understand systematically the operations of “race” (in its complex and varied applications) in the origins of American fiction, race is the focus of several discussions in Revolution and the Word. I note representations of blacks in several early American novels, including The Power of Sympathy, Tabitha Tenney’s Female Quixotism (1801), Modern Chivalry, and, most powerfully, Royall Tyler’s The Algerine Captive (1797).⁷⁸ If I were writing about race and early American fiction now, I would want to investigate divergent treatments of race in different white-authored texts, the network of assumptions supporting racial representations within those texts, the continuities of racial assumptions with other ideological formulations (about sexuality, for example), and, more generally, the contiguity of racialist assumptions undergirding seemingly opposite representations in a variety of different early novels. For example, the portrayal of African Americans in Female Quixotism is derogatory and offensive. What are the interconnections between racial attitudes in that novel and Tenney’s representation of Dorcasina Sheldon’s sentimental fantasies of upward mobility through a successful heterosexual union? What is the role of parody in maintaining the status quo on any number of levels? Female Quixotism is a novel ripe for a multipronged decon-struction.

Similarly, there are unresolved paradoxes even in an abolitionist text such as The Algerine Captive. Updike Underhill, the alternately clownish and serious protagonist of this picaresque and moralistic tale, is captured by Barbary pirates. Tyler works by a reversal of racial polarities: his protagonist, a white American who is enslaved by North Africans, assesses the conditions, morality, and pain of slavery. Lest the reader miss his point, Tyler explicitly applies the lessons learned in Algiers to America, underscoring the hypocrisy of a land founded on an ideology of freedom thriving on the slave trade and the subjugation and debasement of other human beings. For Tyler, to create a revolution on a rhetoric of equality and to ratify a Constitution founded on a compromise that accepted slavery was dramatic proof of a violation of American idealism at its founding moment. This is not to say that Tyler is a radical. While passionate on the topic of abolitionism, he also ends his novel with a plea for calm citizenship and national unity. What he poses (but does not resolve) for his readers is the core Constitutional problem of which should take precedence—the principle of equality (necessitating the abolition of slavery) or the principle of unity (necessitating the compromise that allowed slavery in several states).

Native Americans are also the focus of some discussions in Revolution and the Word, but here, too, the focus is primarily on the representation of Indians in white-authored texts, with some historical attention to the treatment of Native Americans in the postrevolutionary era, in particular the genocidal history of American colonization of the New World.⁷⁹ What was not current in literary studies in the 1970s and 1980s (but which would have been invaluable to the history and theory I presented in Revolution and the Word) was an overarching comprehension of racism as a system and symptom that linked slavery, genocide, imperialism (including the Barbary pirates who profiteered off the underbelly of imperialism and the slave trade), capitalism, and modernity. As with the magnifying glass of critical race theory that exposes the fingerprints of racism where they were previously invisible, recent discussions of the attitudes and treatment of indigenous populations in the conquest of the “New World” expose the propagandistic functions of the literary tropes of the heroic Indian, the noble savage, and the barbaric savage.

In this regard, I am persuaded by insights by the world systems theorist Immanuel Waller stein. In a succinct and magisterial essay written with Anibal Quijano, Waller stein links “coloniality, ethnicity, racism, and the concept of newness itself” as the four building blocks upon which the new United States was created. Ethnicity, he argues, is the “inevitable cultural consequence of coloniality” because it delineates and enforces hierarchy within a society in flux with immigrants from many lands as well as with the indigenous peoples of that conquered land. Whether slavery for Africans, coerced agricultural labor (or genocide) for Native Americans, or indentured labor for working-class Europeans (valued according to a racialized ethnic hierarchy as well), ethnicity and racism reinforced a new value and class system in America. The specter of working-class riots and race riots within America, and the external example of the slave revolts in Haiti, helped America’s ruling class gain acceptance for a new American state that fell far short of its most idealistic prerevolutionary articulations.⁸⁰ A number of historians and literary theorists, including Russ Castronovo, Eric Cheyfitz, Saidiya Hartman, Amy Kaplan, and Ann Laura Stoler, have also analyzed the continuous relationship between U.S. nationalism and imperialism—especially the American adaptation of slavery to colonial capitalism and then its exporting of racial supremacist thinking in its colonizing of other nations.⁸¹

Literary race studies have taken several forms in recent years that bear on Revolution and the Word. Deconstructing the term “race” has been one of the most interesting and compelling developments in critical race theory over the last decade. A first move seems, in retrospect, to be obvious but was not at the time: that “race” applies to everyone, not simply to people of color. Sometimes labeled as “whiteness studies” (a term that, personally, I find far more limited than the concept), these analyses of race by scholars including Eric Lott, David Roediger, and Robyn Wiegman understand its operations even in situations and texts where it seemingly has no place.⁸² One of the most powerful analyses of whiteness comes from a surprising source—a critical book by the Nobel Prizewinning novelist Toni Morrison. Her now classic Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination observes and examines the roiling energy in certain white-authored texts—Poe, Melville, Cather, Hemingway—that occurs before any person of color enters the scene. She documents an infusion of prose polemic that has no logical cause and that becomes explicable only a few paragraphs or pages later when the black character finally enters the scene. That—the mysterious disturbance, barely noticeable, even subliminal—is the affective universe of unconscious racism. The precision with which Morrison zeroes in on the jolts in the prose style of these authors allows for a powerful theory of how freedom, individualism, innocence, and manhood in these texts depend on a black presence (configured, inevitably, as not free). She uses this textual sign as a metaphor for how race, racism, and racial tension operate throughout American society—including in situations where all participants are white.

Systems of racial coding, the workings of racism, the privileges of whiteness, and the complex intertwining of racial, sexual, gender, class, national, and other kinds of codifications have received much scholarly attention in the past decade.⁸³ Through profound reexaminations of how these assumptions are coterminous and mutually constitutive or in detailed analyses of one particular incident, law, or event, scholars studying race have made visible a system that American society conceals. They have focused on the creation of modern fields of study—from anthropology to medicine—to understand how racialist assumptions have shaped so profoundly the way we educate our culture to racism, embedding racist assumptions so deeply that it takes relentless excavation to find their origins.⁸⁴ Through these studies, we are redefining what race is and how much its assumptions permeate every aspect of American society.

As I have argued throughout this introduction, by accepting the bitter compromise over slavery in order to win the Southern support needed for creation and ratification of the Constitution, those Founders who were abolitionists made a moral choice for unity over conviction. At what should have been a glorious and triumphant moment, slavery became the law of the land and one race of humans deemed another less than human. The values, ideology, and social psychology of that compromise had an indelible effect on American culture and history, from the early national period to the present.

History of the Book

The “single field” that was most important in bringing the arguments of Revolution and the Word beyond the world of English departments was history of the book. I put the phrase “single field” in quotation marks to signal that the history of the book was neither singular nor a “field” if accounted for by any definition that includes departmental structures or traditional disciplines. History of the book largely comprises social historians and literature scholars, all of whom have a sense that there is something to be learned by what the other does if we are to comprehend the material and social factors influencing how books are written, circulated (sometimes in manuscript), printed, distributed, and read.⁸⁵ The complexities of such an enterprise cannot be comprehended by one field alone and, indeed, rarely by one person. Many of the most important contributions in history of the book are made not by one person but by collaborative teams of scholars.

Certainly, Revolution and the Word would have made a far less important contribution had I not been fortunate to receive a fellowship at the American Antiquarian Society (AAS) and to spend a summer with other scholars working in the AAS Program on the History of the Book. I count among the most revelatory moments of my academic career the day at AAS when I asked to see all copies of all editions of America’s first best-seller, Susanna Rowson’s Charlotte Temple (1791). Since AAS, like every major archive, must carefully control access to the fragile materials for which it serves as custodian (and especially popular nineteenth-century books that are literally turning to dust because of the quality of the paper and ink used in cheap editions), assembling all of the editions was an “occasion” at AAS. I’ll never forget the excited crowd of scholars and professional librarians who assembled around the two book carts in which dozens of Charlotte Temples had been arranged in chronological order. At a glance, we were all seeing the history of the popular book in America—duodecimos, children’s books, gilt-edged gift books, working-class story papers, even a scholarly edition of Charlotte Temple prepared in 1905 (and which, perhaps significantly, marked the last printing of the book for some sixty years). The material evidence before us on that cart suggested how one book can serve many audiences and a variety of social purposes, something literary critics can easily forget.⁸⁶ The experience became central to my “history of texts” approach. That approach combined many of the insights of French literary theory with work by social historians, including those in or influenced by the Annales school.⁸⁷

The Program in the History of the Book in American Culture at AAS continues to provide fellowships, offer seminars, and support a wide-ranging network of scholars across disciplinary boundaries. Some of the most important work in book history has come from scholars affiliated with this program. To cite just a few in a wide range of such books: William J. Gilmore’s Reading Becomes a Necessity of Life: Material and Cultural Life in Rural New England, 1780–1835, the excellent source book Perspectives on American History: Artifacts and Commentary, edited by Scott E. Casper, Joanne D. Chaison, and Jeffrey D. Groves, and Reading Acts: U.S. Readers’ Interactions with Literature, 1800–1950, edited by Barbara Ryan and Amy M. Thomas. The five-volume compendium for which David D. Hall serves as the general editor promises to provide a thorough, canonical, and significant foundation for future research in history of the book in America. At this writing, the impressive first volume has already made a contribution by taking a trans-Atlantic approach to early American book production and consumption.⁸⁸

To the forms of archival research common to historians of the book, Revolution and the Word added theoretical concerns with epistemology. Because someone read a certain book, how do we know what they made of that book? I argued for a “history of texts” to signal that, even once we know all the material and sociological conditions of readership, we are still left with the particularity of the reading experience. If readers didn’t find different ways of interpreting their texts, we would not need to teach or write about literature. The fact that a single text can generate multiple interpretations makes it clear that reading is as complex as human psychology. Yet the fact that thousands (or, in more recent times, millions) of readers may read the same text also has an impact on public culture. Reading is both a private and a public act. How do we understand what that act means? For contemporary culture, we can use ethnographic methods to determine how readers understand what they read. My challenge was to put together, from the scraps left by history, insights into reading from readers who had been dead for over two hundred years.⁸⁹

I did so in any way I could, with the awareness that any one method has limitations. For example, a fundamental way that social historians understand the texture of lives in another era is by diaries and letters. Some historians take what is written in these forms, especially within a diary, as “true.” My history of texts approach signals a certain skepticism—texts (all texts) must be interpreted. They are not transparent or univocal in their meaning. The challenge with personal forms is for the historian to judge “representativeness”: How much does or doesn’t an individual’s responses reflect those of others in his or her society? What literary conventions are at work in an individual’s expressiveness, shaping even what might seem like the unmediated communication between writer and diary? As I saw time and again in the diaries and letters I found, readers who love sentimental fiction, for example, often write and observe the world in the hyperbolic, exclamatory style of sentimental fiction. Personal accounts have gaps that the historian must fill in, and often those gaps are the most central (and inexpressible) events in a life. Nor are people always reliable witnesses or informants. My point in emphasizing these human qualities is not to undermine one of the few means by which historians can access the private record of past eras but to stress the continuities and codes mediating “private” and “public” expression in any era.

It was partly from my frustration with the limited array of tools in the social historian’s took kit that I also began looking for and, eventually, collecting marginalia. For probably the first six or seven years of my research, I noted marginal remarks in novels almost as a hobby. I found words scribbled on end pages of novels or written in the margins interesting and often delightful, but it was quite late in the writing of Revolution and the Word that I realized I might actually be able to use them as “evidence.” It was, once again, in the company of other historians of the book at the American Antiquarian Society that I found myself arguing that the telegraphed marginalia in hundreds of copies of novels could provide a sampling of book use and attachment that supplemented the insights in diaries, letters, and reviews of the time. It was refreshing to find that many scholars (especially those working on premodern traditions) had used marginalia as evidence, even though this was not common for Euro-Americanists working on post-Enlightenment topics. A number of recent exhibits of marginalia have examined the function of such scratchings, both for the individual writer and for later historians, whether in the ancient world or in the present.

A number of critics have taken up the controversy discussed in Revolution and the Word about the role of novel reading in the creation of the American polis. I argue for a continuity between private and public spheres in which some who were legally and politically excluded from U.S. politics could express opinions on the shape of public culture through the novels they wrote as well as the ones they bought and borrowed. As I note in Revolution and the Word, every early American novel somewhere in its plot addresses the topic of education, often with special attention to the education of women. Even the most sensational novels typically included a preface that made explicit the civic mission of the novel. Rather than seeing them as pro forma, I took these expressions seriously in Revolution and the Word and argued that the novel became a major space for the articulation of public values within the alternative political community created by the circulation of books and sometimes away from the more visible public culture of oratory (for example, in churches or political rallies).⁹⁰ Because of my interest in the circulation of ideas outside organized and hierarchical (top-down) communication networks, I realized that my history of texts approach would provide me with a new body of evidence as a conceptual framework for understanding the multiple aspects of print culture in material, legal, social, and psychological terms.

As I write this introduction, I’m not sure either a “history of the book” or a “history of texts” approach comprehends what is obviously one of the most important developments in the history of “print” since Gutenberg invented movable type.⁹¹ I speak of digitization and the creation of electronic forms of print. It is as impossible today to anticipate what American literary studies will look like fifteen years from now as it would have been to imagine future intellectual developments from the vantage point of 1986 when Revolution and the Word first appeared—but it is absolutely certain that, whatever the future holds, it will be enhanced, challenged, facilitated, transformed, influenced, or in other ways changed by electronic access to a world of ideas and archives. In fact, the electronic media are so pervasive that we need to be thinking ahead to a “history of the archive” and not simply of “the book,” or we need to extend the metaphor of “book” and “print” to include a variety of mediated digital forms, including Web sites, databases, and other electronic sources. Nor is it too early to do critical thinking about this glorious new medium of electronic databases and to apply the history of texts approach to digitization too: who is doing the digitizing, who has access, what is not being digitized, and who decides? Are there forms of evidence (such as marginalia) that are not part of the digital package? How do we both take advantage of the wealth of new materials and guard ever more zealously against a complacent sense that what has been digitized is somehow “complete.”

It is not clear what influence new digitized materials will have on the study of early America, but, without a doubt, it is and will continue to have an ever greater impact. Scholars (and I am among them) who spent thousands of hours laboriously searching through archives or bent over a microform reader are astonished by resources such as the new “Digital Evans.” This is a digitization of Charles Evans’s famous American Bibliography (1955), which made available virtually every book, pamphlet, and broadside published in America from 1639 to 1800. Now, the Digital Evans gives us the same resource as a database with 36,000 works and 2,400,000 images available and searchable to anyone who is a member of a library that owns the database-driven Web site. In a matter of minutes, one can find every book that uses the word “woman” in its title, for example, or can search for the word “novel” in eighteenth-century publishers’ account books. And we are clearly only at the beginning of this brave new world in scholarly digitization. I would not venture to predict what kinds of scholarship will be facilitated by these new tools—but I am completely comfortable predicting that the tools, now as ever, will have an irrevocable impact on future scholarship.

What Is a Field?

As the foregoing discussion has made clear, fields change. A work of historical research and literary scholarship may well answer certain quandaries, but the very act of formulating an answer makes visible new kinds of questions. Scholars take up those questions, and the answers they pose then reveal other areas of ignorance, confusion, or murkiness. And so it goes, until there is such a sophisticated and interconnected body of knowledge that we soon have what amounts to a new field. At the same time, when we return to the original work, there may be many areas that suddenly look new, that were never taken up and commented on, and that provide new grounds for analyses, research, and exploration.

What forces, influences, resources, politics, and transitions in the life of an academic discipline lead to the opening up of new areas of knowledge for examination? And when is there then enough material, conversation, organization, and controversy (for a field cannot exist without debate that defines its parameters) for a new field to emerge? Articles, books, panels at conferences, and then whole conferences begin to realign bodies of knowledge and networks of scholars. Next, someone creates a professional association (formal or informal). Course syllabi change, then courses are introduced and sometimes even become required as part of the core of a department’s curriculum. Faculty members need to be hired to teach these courses. Graduate students decide to come work in a given department because of what is offered and who is teaching there. Gradually, balances that had tipped in one direction tilt in another.

In the 1980s and 1990s, many English departments added an introduction to critical theory as part of their graduate and sometimes undergraduate requirements. During that same time period, many colleges and universities added courses and (much less frequently) requirements in identity-based areas such as women’s studies, gender studies, sexuality studies, ethnic studies, or race studies (terms that sometimes overlap and carry both specific and general meanings). Postcolonial studies is another area that has emerged since the 1990s. Job descriptions have appeared in forums such as the MLA Job Information List requiring expertise in these subfields, often in addition to training in an area designated by a more traditional period (medieval studies or the eighteenth century). What such overlapping job descriptions document is the way we have both the creation of subfields and paradigm shifts in the shape, emphases, interests, and objects of study within existing fields. The process is ever-evolving and, to my mind, as productive as it is unstoppable. The history of ideas throughout the West records these Kuhnian transformations, both subtle and cataclysmic, cyclical and epistemic.⁹²

Whenever an original theory, an important book, a new discovery (“the first African American novel,” etc.), or a different archive is identified, responsible scholars must circle back and reexamine some of our premises. It is virtually impossible to simply restore the old after a confrontation with the new. Returning to “traditional” areas of knowledge after a time of debate about the most fundamental disciplinary assumptions is not a return at all but a rediscovery precisely because of all we have learned on the journey back. For example, Revolution and the Word, as its title suggests, was always and intentionally focused on the interesting and not entirely coincidental fact that the novel took off as a literary form exactly as the nation was forming itself. That was the motivating argument of my book. Yet fifteen years of writing about colonial and postcolonial states and the culture produced in those states has made the whole idea of national formation far more complex and vexed. So while I spent a good deal of work unpacking certain definitional problems in gender theory and also in analyzing the disproportionate sense of exclusion or inclusion experienced by those who felt themselves marginalized (by class or race or gender or immigrant status), I spent less time defining the particular notion of “nation” embedded in founding documents and founding novels. That term seems less transparent to me now that it has been the subject of such scrupulous analysis, especially in relationship to such words as “state,” “country,” “continent,” “colony,” and “empire.” Clearly as used in the Federalist Papers, the word “nation” variously designates a political entity, an ideology, a fiction of collectivity, a consortium of interested entities, a borderland within a far larger land mass occupied by different peoples or “staked” by different colonizing countries, and even a claim to some of those lands on the other side of those borders. Were I sitting down to write Revolution and the Word now, significantly more of the text would be spent explicating nationalism before I went on to analyze the representational role played by the nation’s founding documents (whether the Constitution or the “first American novel”). Five years from now, however, nationalism might not be a key concern. It’s impossible to know. And that’s a good thing, for the condition of not-knowing is what keeps the intellectual life alive. If the academy were not responsive to changing social, political, and intellectual currents, it would be ossified and irrelevant, and, ultimately, it would fail in its pedagogical function of preparing students for the future. Intellectual dexterity—being able to shift directions because of pressing concerns—is, to my mind, the best feature of the modern university.

What shapes those changing “concerns and interests”? Indisputably, each generation of students is faced with different social, political, economic, scientific, and technological challenges and brings those concerns into the classrooms—in the questions they ask about what they read, in the papers they write, in the challenges they pose. As with other collaborative (rather than hierarchical) models of cultural change I’ve argued for in this introduction, in very real ways teachers are as influenced by their students’ concerns as students are inspired by their professors’ scholarship. Or at least for good teachers and students this is always a two-way process. Not to belabor the obvious, it should be underscored that even academics live in a world outside the academy as well as within. That world bears significantly on our intellectual lives (and vice versa).

In the years since the publication of Revolution and the Word, a number of events have brought us back to discussions about why the Constitution was constructed as it was and what, exactly, it means. Everything from the impeachment of President Bill Clinton to the election of George W. Bush without the popular vote and partly based on a controversial and shockingly rapid Supreme Court decision has encouraged new courses and books on democracy, representative government, separations of power, and the electoral college. Northwestern University Law School’s Center on Wrongful Convictions has used DNA and other forms of scientific and forensic evidence to exonerate falsely accused prisoners on death row. The sociological work determining the racial basis of a disproportionate number of those false accusations has inspired extensive scholarship on the history, efficacy, and international attitudes toward the death penalty. Women’s reproductive rights, affirmative action, and privacy are all areas of social and civil legislation currently gaining renewed attention by both grassroots political activists and by academics precisely because these areas are under increasingly conservative legal and political pressure. Global information systems and new international movements of capital (by NGOs, multinational corporations, or even terrorist networks) have had a direct impact on international studies and on political theories of globalization. And certainly the impact of the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, as well as the United States’ unprecedented break with the traditions and imperatives of international law in order to declare war against Iraq, has meant that courses in Middle Eastern history, Islamic studies, and Arabic are attracting more students than ever before—and more job openings for faculty in those areas (even in a year that saw a 20 percent decline in the number of academic job listings in English departments and a 16 percent decline in other foreign language departments).⁹³ Military history is, once again, a “hot” field. So is international diplomacy.

My point, simply, is that the academy is continuous with and a contributor to other historical processes. The humanities, especially, are centrally placed to offer historical depth, theoretical insights, critical resistance, and comparative complexity to public policy debates. If the humanities, definitionally, are the study of what it means to be human—offered in the widest historical and international context—then it should be the role of the humanities to put policy in a clear and firm perspective, both historical and comparative. Conversely, social and political events have an impact on the shape of scholarship and on the definition of fields. I tend to be optimistic about this process and convinced that education means being responsive to the questions most on the minds of our students.

Yet change can also bring problems. The shifts in focus and emphasis can sometimes contribute to what Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham calls “academic amnesia,” a process by which known histories are forgotten or repressed, especially histories by those occupying marginalized positions within the academy and within society at large. In a forthcoming study on the history of race in the twentieth century, Higginbotham finds that many ideas are left behind so completely that a new generation of scholars often researches the problem all over again, only to arrive once more at similar conclusions. Indeed, even the lament that subsequent generations find themselves reinventing the wheel was expressed in the 1930s by black historians surprised to find forgotten histories of black education, rebellion under slavery, and earlier biographies of forgotten black leaders of the nineteenth century. This loss of academic memory can be depressing if it seems that progressive scholarship is doomed to be forgotten (a complaint that has been made by feminist scholars and those working in sexuality studies as well as scholars of race). At other times, however, ideas move outward from academe to become commonsense notions in the culture at large and persist as part of the common knowledge even when their original scholarly traces are lost. Both processes—of loss and of influence—may well occur simultaneously.⁹⁴

Perhaps the single most important change in humanistic disciplines since the 1986 publication of Revolution of the World is in the conscious and conscientious pursuit of and debate about interdisciplinarity in the humanities.⁹⁵ The sciences have favored an interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary model for both intellectual and material reasons at least since the end of World War II, but cross-disciplinary thinking has come more slowly in the humanities and interpretive social sciences.

During the 1970s and 1980s when I was writing Revolution and the Word, interdisciplinarity also met with a good deal of resistance—particularly between historians and literary scholars, but also within literature and history departments. In the most heated of these debates, historians (and traditionalist literary critics) dismissed the exciting developments in literary theory as “jargon” and intellectual hocus-pocus while literary theorists accused traditional historians of “positivism.” In writing Revolution and the Word, my largest interdisciplinary ambition was methodological: I wanted to combine the most diligent archival research with poststructuralist theories of knowledge, to combine archive with Foucauldian interrogations of what is legitimated as an archive. In some forums, it was worth risking making these kinds of methodological leaps. In others, my attempts to combine history and theory were so unproductive (including the kind of name-calling noted earlier) that I often had to decide, in advance of presenting a paper at a scholarly gathering, what outcome I hoped for from the presentation. If debate was a worthy outcome, I combined my different interests. If, however, I hoped to test certain findings or theories in the most rigorous way, I quickly discovered that it worked best if I disaggregated my work. Often, when I was presenting a paper at a historical meeting, I would present my archival findings with nary a mention of Foucault. The result would inevitably be a rich discussion that would lead me to many new archival sources as well as debate on the minutia of my material that pushed me to ever-greater detail and accuracy. If I were presenting a paper at a congress of literary theorists, I did not often show overheads of the various “scrabblings” I’d discovered on the endpapers of dozens of duodecimos of Charlotte Temple. Talk of marbling, watermarks, and signatures would have led to glazed eyes, not exciting discussion that tested the limits of my own theoretical thinking.

During the ten years when I was presenting papers leading up to the publication of Revolution and the Word, I was extremely excited by what I learned from specialized audiences. At the same time, it was depressing that the choice was, on two or three occasions (I do not mean to overstate the case), between withholding certain of my arguments in order to have a productive conversation or of articulating my full vision of the subject and courting the all-too-common outcome of having discussion devolve into unproductive and often ad hominem debate. Sometimes it was entirely worthwhile entering the fray of debate. If it weren’t for finding a number of brilliant and generous scholars working on the history of the book, I might have left the field feeling, simply, frayed.

Writing about interdisciplinarity, Lisa Lattuca has noted: “To the untrained eye the world is interdisciplinary—or, more accurately, nondisciplinary. In Western society, our attempts to understand it, however, are often discipline-based. In Cartesian fashion we use our analytic skills to divide the world into smaller and smaller units, hoping that in understanding the parts we will eventually understand the whole.”⁹⁶ It is my conviction, however, that it doesn’t work that way. One can understand ever more detailed parts without coming up with a whole picture. More to the point, only through interdisciplinary open-ness can one arrive at a whole that is, as the saying goes, greater than the sum of its parts. Although one can learn certain specific kinds of information and gain some precise insights from this division of the world into minute disciplinary parts, it demands greater intellectual rigor to take those findings and synthesize them into a larger, interdisciplinary whole. Rather than (as is the cliché) interdisciplinarity implying a loss of standards, I would insist that it ultimately requires a higher standard of accountability and precision, including being tested by those who do not share one’s informing assumptions.

Part of my job in writing Revolution and the Word was to put together the specialized knowledge I was gaining from each scholarly field and find a way to present it such that it had value to both its “home” discipline and the other.⁹⁷ However, my real aim was combining these various specialized knowledges into a theory of the novel that took into account the relationship between texts and society, between real readers and theories of reading, and material and formalist literary analysis. Much of the introductory material in Revolution and the Word explicitly addresses the investments of literary theory in cultural history. Conversely, the introductory chapters argue for the light that can be shed on cultural and social history by reader-response criticism, poststructuralist examinations of power and knowledge, and deconstructive readings of texts and textuality that alert us to seemingly disparate and even opposite ideologies, plots, and structures that coexist within the same book.⁹⁸

Making one field of study visible to another is only the first level of true interdisciplinarity. For years, even within an ostensibly interdisciplinary organization such as the American Studies Association, there were often panels that “looked like” history whereas others “looked like” literature. Disciplinary barriers have by no means vanished—universities still have departments of history and departments of literature—but more and more courses within each department look like courses that might be taught by the other, and more scholars are actually combining methodologies, theories, and practices from different fields in order to arrive at a larger understanding of a particular topic or area. The merging, influence, blending, and impact of one field on another is, to my mind, one of the most significant characteristics of the humanities in the contemporary American university and certainly was one of the chief motivating forces behind my writing Revolution and the Word. It continues to be a source of intellectual inspiration to me. In fact, as some literary scholars now lament the passing of high poststructuralist literary theory, I tend to see the matter differently. The insights of that theory have permeated the thinking of many of us, including many younger scholars who have accepted the insights of poststructuralist theory without being particularly aware of where those insights originated or how revolutionary they were thought to be in the 1970s and 1980s. To choose two of myriad examples: A decentered canon is a pretty banal notion when one’s college and even high school syllabi already include minority writers, popular culture, media, and new media. Queer theory can seem less radical when its reappropriation of the invidious epithet “queer” has been picked up in the titles of popular television shows or when its academic proponents are quoted in a Supreme Court decision. Similarly, poststructuralism (including deconstruction) has influenced virtually every humanistic field and is also used casually in popular discourse about architecture, law, engineering, cooking, or fashion. The realms of archive (history), text (literature), and ethnography (anthropology) have become increasingly mixed and merged not only across the disciplines but within the very disciplines themselves.

As I have been suggesting, who decides what is or isn’t central to a nation’s culture was hotly debated in the early national period because it was assumed that cultural values and political life were contiguous. Intriguingly, the same issue became the focus of much national debate again throughout the 1980s and 1990s, partly in response to and in backlash against modestly successful efforts to expand the syllabus of the college core curriculum.⁹⁹ Books such as Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind (1987) and E. D. Hirsh’s Cultural Literacy (1987) fanned the flames of the Culture Wars (and climbed best-seller lists) by insisting that American culture was going to the dogs.¹⁰⁰ The “dogs” were defined widely and variously, as proponents and purveyors of mass culture as well as (incongruously) feminists, people of color, Marxists, Vietnam War protestors, and other radicals who were thought to be controlling the academy, changing the syllabi and required courses, replacing core courses in Western civilization with “politically correct” requirements for “diversity” and “Third World” culture. Under the Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush presidential administrations, highly politicized directors and governing boards for the federal agencies supporting American cultural production—the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts—worked to stem the tide of “liberal” and “left” infiltration of the academy by supporting works that were purportedly of a higher moral value and that promoted a “shared national culture.” Reviving interest in the “Great Books” of Western culture was seen as the antidote to both populism and multiculturalism. Returning to New Criticism (the critical formalism prominent between the 1940s and late 1960s) was the solution to poststructuralism.

Writing a book on early American novels that no one had heard of and arguing that these proposed an alternative to the constricted democratic principles offered by the Founding Fathers put me squarely in the “liberal” corner in what became known as the “Culture Wars,” a term every bit as hyperbolic as the overheated and acrimonious discourse of the time. What intrigues me most in retrospect, however, is the resonance between questions raised by the Culture Wars and those by the Revolutionary War. In both, culture authorities (including teachers and scholars) were perceived to have the real and active power to change lives, influence opinion, and, ultimately, sway votes, thus determining the shape of the future. And at both time periods, a constellation of jumbled values were lumped under the rubric of culture. In the 1980s, there was heated debate over which books should be required reading for students; the grounds for inclusion of that list of books; and whether the list was based on intrinsic (formal) merit, traditional values, patriotic concerns, habit, or prejudice against (or on behalf of, said conservative critics) women, people of color, labor activists, Marxists, radicals, the aesthetic avant-garde, or popular culture.

The argument over “culture” in the 1980s was a stand-in for more concrete political activities that were labeled the “Reagan Revolution,” the attempt by a popular president and his administration to roll back many of the social reforms enacted by Lyndon Johnson as part of the “Great Society” as well as by later presidents, especially in the aftermath of the Vietnam War. As with the censure of the novel, the “Culture Wars” and “canon debate” were terms deployed to make it seem as if there were clear sides (good and evil, traditional and radical, high culture and low), but the use of the terms was often slippery, subjective, and non-exclusive. One can believe, for example, that one should read African American writers and believe that popular culture is debased and unworthy of significant study. W. E. B. DuBois, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Gwendolyn Brooks, or Toni Morrison are hardly writers one reads as light entertainments or for mindless escapism. Somehow pointing out these contradictions was less important than the polemical heat (and the headlines) that could be generated by, for example, accusing the Nobel Prize Committee of bowing to “political correctness” in choosing Toni Morrison as the recipient of its prize for literature.¹⁰¹

The real issue—in the early Republic as in the 1980s—was less the value of certain literary texts than the power of writers, artists, educators, and scholars to shape social attitudes: to determine a “national culture.” The rhetoric in both the 1790s and the 1980s was hyperbolic because it was supposed that the stakes were the very highest: the definition of American society itself.¹⁰²

Revolution and the Word was one of many scholarly studies of the 1980s thought to be changing the interpretation of our national culture and the canon of American literature. Most of the novels I discussed in Revolution and the Word were not in print when the book appeared or were only available in expensive or obscure editions. Making several of these novels available in classroom editions was an important side-benefit of the book. If there are now myriad articles and books on early American fiction, it is partly because the texts themselves are now accessible and frequently taught in undergraduate and graduate classes.

Many fields besides early American studies were transformed by projects dedicated to creating a new syllabus of American literature and making available as many new texts as possible. The Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers, edited by Henry Louis Gates, the Rutgers University Press American Women Writers Series, or the monumental retrieval efforts by the Feminist Press were among the important series that expanded the canon. In addition to these republications of individual titles, the collaborative effort that led to the creation of the Heath Anthology of American Literature (1990), edited by Paul Lauter and many others, gave teachers a chance to redesign their American literature survey courses to include works that may have been widely esteemed in their day but, for one reason or another, had dropped off the literary map.¹⁰³ The availability of these new texts as part of the core teaching in undergraduate courses shaped the assumptions, the pedagogy, and the future scholarship of Americanists.

In early American studies, several new anthologies also have changed the shape of the field. Two massive anthologies, The English Literatures of America, 1500—1800 (1997) and The Literatures of Colonial America (2001), remap early American literature in terms of colonial expansion in the New World.¹⁰⁴ The Longfellow Project started at Harvard by Marc Shell and Werner Sollors has produced The Multilingual Anthology of American Literature: A Reader of Original Texts with English Translations (2000), a great spur to transnational early American studies. Sharon M. Harris’s American Women Writers to 1800 (1996) is a splendid collection that is arranged chronologically within thematic categories such as “On Women’s Education,” which brings together everything from Zuni corn-grinding lessons to Judith Sargent Murray’s long poem on female complacency and improved education. Ann Allen Shockley’s Afro-American Women Writers, 1746–1933 (1988) includes an impressive selection of early black women’s writing.¹⁰⁵ Moira Ferguson’s Nine Black Women (1998) collects writing by nineteenth-century writers from the United States, Canada, Bermuda, and the Caribbean. Equally exciting are Deirdre Mullane’s Crossing the Danger Water: Three Hundred Years of African-American Writing (1993) and John Edgar Wideman’s My Soul Has Grown Deep: Classics of Early African-American Literature (2001).¹⁰⁶ Alan R. Velie’s American Indian Literature (1991) includes tales, songs, oratory, memoirs, poetry, and fiction, from pre-Columbian oral transmission to the present.¹⁰⁷ Arnold Krupat’s anthology Native American Autobiography (1994) includes a section on “Traditional Lives” and a contrasting section on “Christian Indians” before the 1830 Indian Removal. These are among the many excellent new anthologies that have not only contributed to the field but changed the map of what constitutes “the field.”

Taken together, all of these books, plus dozens of other reprints and anthologies published by various university and commercial presses, have transformed the shape of American literature, redirecting the questions one asks, posing new scholarly puzzles, demanding new literary histories. What is available to be read has a profound impact on the way one sees everything else. One’s archive shapes one’s reading of the archive. That works negatively as well. It is possible to continue in one’s conception of the world by not reading, by retaining the paradigms and syllabus in which one was educated even after those intellectual structures have outlasted their usefulness. Whether to keep freshly reading or to preserve—as if it were a museum or a shrine—the archive of one’s youth is a decision each scholar makes for herself or himself over the course of a career. Some find it exhilarating while others (in any generation) consider the new to be a “declension,” personally and for the profession at large.

Change was at the root of the Culture Wars but with a difference: Now change itself was the subject of debate. Shouldn’t we all, forever, be reading the same books in order to be unified as a nation? Aren’t those who propose new texts and new ways of reading old texts destroying our culture? In 1991, I edited the section on “Beginnings to the Mid-Nineteenth Century” for the Columbia History of the American Novel edited by Emory Elliott.¹⁰⁸ When the book was published, the editors were all surprised to find that the words “New Views” had been added to the dust jacket without the foreknowledge or approval of any of us. It was as if someone in the publisher’s head office, frightened by the hyperbole and upheaval of the Culture Wars, was afraid that the volume was too new, too radical to be an official “history.” The force of those two words lay somewhere between a disclaimer and a “parental guidance” sticker on a rap album.

However, in 2003, the Columbia History of the American Novel looks pretty benign, even canonical. I doubt that any student reading it now finds it particularly shocking. So it goes. “Culture Wars? What were those about?” a first-year graduate student recently asked me. I smiled with delight at her casual use of the past tense. A lot of heat and fury, careers made and lost, took place over a process that is as inevitable as breathing. And perhaps that is exactly as it should be. If the intellectual life is important, then problems of content, importance, paradigms, methods, and theories all should be debated. Debate (even acrimonious debate) is part of the process by which new ideas are accepted. In the words of Martin Bernai, the author of the controversial Black Athena, any novel and significant insight or discovery goes through a four-stage process of being ignored, dismissed, attacked, and then eventually absorbed. In Bernal’s verdict: “Attack is great progress.”¹⁰⁹

History is never still. Intellectual vitality requires that each new generation of students and scholars pose new questions. The answers evoke still other questions. Inevitably, every scholar in the course of a career has to make a decision whether to continue reading, thinking, growing, and changing. The bitterness of being passed by, overlooked, or shortchanged is, it seems to me, the personal price one pays for becoming stuck in the glowing paradigms of one’s intellectual youth, as pristine (and remote) as a mosquito caught in amber.

Conclusion

In October 1999 I attended a conference on American studies at Vietnam National University in Hanoi. A delegation of American scholars joined Vietnamese colleagues for the first American studies conference ever held in the new capital of Vietnam. “American Studies Today” was organized by Jonathan Auerbach and Nguyen Lien. They also coedited the historic bilingual conference volume, Tiếp Cận Ðὐỏng Ðại Vặn Hoá Mỹ /Contemporary Approaches to American Culture.¹¹⁰

The historical situation that led to this binational academic meeting gave special weight to the questions we asked repeatedly during our two days together. These were questions not about the past but about the future: How do you make a national culture after a revolution or any violent rupture in civil society overthrows an external (colonial) power? What cultural forms best serve the post-revolutionary and postcolonial goals of expressing, concretizing, and coalescing support for the values of a nascent and fragile nation-state? What are the profound effects of war on the creation of a subsequent national culture? And what influences carry over between national cultures? One feature of the conference recognized by all who were present was that Americans came as guests. Vietnamese scholars spoke with authority about both American and Vietnamese culture. They spoke of the lasting effect of American culture on Vietnam. However, what turned out to be the surprise of the conference for all was discovering that the Vietnamese scholars were not aware of influence in the other direction. In their preface, Nguyen Lien and Nguyen Ba Thanh note that “for the first time, we Vietnamese have come to realize the powerful influence [of the Vietnam War and Vietnamese resistance] on cultural movements that have brought about great changes in American academia and publishing and in other spheres of American life.”¹¹¹ The Vietnamese scholars were, in their own historical context and moment, trying to rebuild intellectual life and, more specifically, to create an intellectual and cultural life suitable to their new nation—including by finding validation in the impact that they had exerted on the cultural life of the United States.

Again and again, the topics to which the Vietnamese returned during this conference were the ones raised in Revolution and the Word and central to the debates on national culture in the aftermath of the U.S. Revolutionary War. At one point, a Vietnamese scholar showed me the inexpensive textbook she had created for her students in her American studies course. It included a pirated excerpt from Revolution and the Word. Her self-published textbook was printed on inexpensive paper, the words crammed as closely together as possible. Instantly I was reminded of the cheap early American editions of popular tales such as Charlotte Temple or History of Constantius and Pulchera that had been pirated and circulated among the populace. Later, in the course of the conference, another Vietnamese scholar told me, much to my surprise, that Revolution and the Word is an important book in present-day Vietnam. She said scholars and students believe it addresses the problems they face in the aftermath of both the “American War” (their name for what we call the “Vietnam War”) and their subsequent civil war, and as they struggle to create a unified nation. She explained that many of the debates on national culture in the aftermath of the U.S. Revolutionary War parallel debates in modern-day Vietnam about what constitutes a national culture. What is the relationship between literacy levels, education, and cultural life? What is advanced literacy in political and social terms, and who is granted access to “universal” literacy? How do you foster, subsidize, regulate, and promote an indigenous print culture—and how does the definition of the nation influence that cultural production? What is a government’s obligations to its authors, and where is the line between promoting national literature and imposing standards for what does or does not constitute the “right” national image? Where does censorship (as well as more subtle cultural censure) come into the picture? How do the special circumstances of postrevolutionary society influence the definitions and regulation of intellectual property, copyright, patent, and tariff protection (to either encourage or minimize the importation of books and magazines from outside the new nation)? What is the role of a national educational system in the creation of postcolonial culture? A national system of libraries? Subsidized publishing? And how does one ensure access to national culture to an entire populace—including women, people of color, the indigent, various religious and ethnic groups, rural citizens, and those who may not share the values of the new nation? In Vietnam in 1999, as in the new United States in 1789, these were complex and intertwined subjects of vital significance.¹¹²

My discovery that Revolution and the Word was being studied as a blueprint for how to make a national culture in present-day Vietnam—as much as for what it said about the American past—brought home to me, in a literal fashion, the active role history plays in any society and the historian’s role in creating (not just re-creating) history. My wish for present readers of Revolution and the Word is similar: that they remember that problems of culture and country never go away. We must attend to them now every bit as assiduously as did the first generation of Americans.