Novels of the Nation: Literary Theory, Post-Revolutionary Republicanism, and the Rise of the Novel in America, 1789-1812

"Novels of the Nation: Literary Theory, Post-Revolutionary Republicanism, and the Rise of the Novel in America, 1789-1812" examines previously understudied eighteenth-century texts on neoclassical rhetoric and the belles lettres and representations of literary sensibility in a selection of early American novels. In so doing, this study both highlights the integral connections republican-era literary discourse assumed between literariness, egalitarianism, and national stability and reveals how these relationships were reflected, reinforced, and renegotiated in America's first novels. Previous critical readings of the rise of the American novel resist discussions of the genre's literary qualities. Such readings either view the novel's sentimentalism as evidence of a failed aestheticism or claim that the early American novel's value is not aesthetic, but historical. This dissertation recovers the intellectual history that accorded historical, national, and political relevance to concepts like beauty, taste, and literary pleasure in the early national period and reveals the ways in which America's first novelists interrogated the central notion that a love of literature could be the cornerstone of a democratic society. Chapter 1 introduces two educational texts that taught literature in the neoclassical tradition and were widely read in America in the mid to late eighteenth century: Charles Rollin's Method of Teaching and Studying the Belles Lettres (1732) and Hugh Blair's Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (1783). Studying of these works establishes a more accurate picture of how the United States' first citizens thought about central concepts like literary taste, the social role of polite literature, and the relationship between aesthetic sensibility and national identity. Subsequent chapters proceed with a close analysis of the portrayal of literary sensibility in four novels authored in the years between the Revolution and the War of 1812, concentrating on scenes of reading, poetic composition, and conversation about polite literature. Chapter 2 centers on William Hill Brown's The Power of Sympathy (1789), Chapter 3 focuses on Charles Brockden Brown's Wieland (1798), and Chapter 4 discusses Isaac Mitchell's Alonzo and Melissa (1811) and Chapter 4 addresses Rebecca Rush's Kelroy (1812). Reading these novels in concert with each other reveals changing reactions to the fundamental principles of literary discourse defined in Rollin and Blair's works. In the decades between 1789 and 1812, American authors moved from wholeheartedly accepting the tenets of neoclassical literary discourse and attempting to carve out a place for themselves as the modern descendants of the Greeks and Romans, to questioning the usefulness of this discourse's focus on beauty and taste in a world where more pragmatic concerns clearly reigned, to forging an uneasy peace between traditional literary theory's optimism and the more biting, unflinchingly critical modern paradigms of literature that hoped to replace it. The novel flourished in the context of the new United States precisely because it could manage the tensions that arose as a result of the conflict between neoclassical literary ideology and life on the ground in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth- century America. The novel could at once aim to communicate high ideals and inspire noble sentiments (key aims of classical literature) and regulate the aesthetic responses it hoped to evince (unversed and unadorned when compared to traditional epic genres like poetry, the novel avoided the appearance of being overwrought). Further, I suggest that acknowledging the literary transformations that took place in the earliest years of the United States' independence lends us a different lens through which to view the literary landscape of the nineteenth century. "Novels of the Nation" traces a historical line that connects eighteenth-century literary discourse's emphasis on beauty, taste, and national prosperity to both Emerson's interrogations of man's genius and to Stowe's mobilization of the sentimental novel in the fight against political and social injustice