REEVALUATION AND THE WORD

Cathy Davidson's Revolution and the Word, which celebrates its thirtieth anniversary this year, is a book of many beginnings. Most obviously, of course, it is about the emergence, in the late eighteenth century, of the first novels written by Americans. But as Davidson's Preface puts it, the wider agenda of the book is to analyse “four very different revolutions,” and so to its narrative of the birth of the American novel we find conjoined the story of the new nation's birth within the crucible of political revolution, the story of that new nation's transformation under the impetus of the Industrial Revolution, and the story of how its new citizens embraced and inaugurated a revolution in reading practices (vii). Closely woven together in the eight comprehensive chapters that follow, these themes underpin Davidson's compelling and incisive effort to write a “dialogical history” of America between 1776 and 1820, wherein dramatic moments of social and cultural change are seen to both corroborate and resist each other (256). Equally noteworthy, though, is the fact that Revolution and the Word itself is a point of origin. For in bringing such theoretical sophistication and contextual breadth to bear on the early American novel it can justly be said to have rescued this field of writing from the margins of literary scholarship. Deploying an impressive array of then-burgeoning methodological approaches, from feminist critique and book history to cultural studies and the New Historicism, Revolution and the Word almost single-handedly made the early American novel seem relevant to contemporary scholars and so kick-started the now thriving body of work on these texts.

That Davidson managed to pull off this feat of recuperation is all the more impressive given the long tradition of critical animus that weighed upon the early American novel by the 1980s. The opportunities for canonization presented to these novels when they first appeared were severely limited, since fiction was still a deeply suspect cultural form in the late eighteenth century and the institutions of literary criticism were restricted to a smattering of short-lived magazines whose reviewing habits were sporadic and synoptic at best. Thus most of the texts considered in Revolution and the Word disappeared from public view almost immediately after being published, leaving only a handful of popular titles – such as Susanna Rowson's Charlotte Temple (1794) and Charles Brockden Brown's Edgar Huntly (1799) – to remain in general circulation by the time American literary studies began to take on a more professional guise at the end of the nineteenth century. Ironically, however, it was precisely the taint of popularity that helped to keep the early American novel on the edges of this disciplinary formation, given the nascent field's desire to establish an elite corpus of serious texts that could stand beside the “great works” of English literature. In this respect, the typical generic modes of the early American novel – whether it be sentimentalism and its taste for melodramatic love stories, gothicism and its penchant for grotesque sensationalism, or the picaresque and its investment in low comedy – smacked more of the disreputable world of the dime novel, than of the emphasis in Moses Coit Tyler's Literary History of the American Revolution on “literature in the highest sense of that word – literature as an expression of the aesthetic mood,” or Barrett Wendell's concern with “lasting expressions of the meaning of life” in A Literary History of America.Footnote ¹ To the extent that the early American novel received careful scholarly attention at all during this period, the impetus was coming from the “amateur” realm of antiquarians and local historical societies, as was the case with Caroline Dall's pioneering The Romance of the Association; or, One Last Glimpse of Charlotte Temple and Eliza Wharton (1875).

The major critical movements of the first half of the twentieth century would prove no more congenial to the early American novel: its themes were too secular and too liberal for the New Humanists, its formal qualities were too crude and too uneven for the New Critics, and its characters were too Anglicized and too un-Romantic for the Myth and Symbol School. A few maverick critics, most notably Leslie Fiedler and Terence Martin, were beginning to treat the early American novel in earnest by the end of the 1950s, but even those who dedicated extensive time and effort to the consideration of these works tended to adopt a tone of impatient condescension.Footnote ² Thus, while the most direct precedent for Revolution and the Word, Alexander Cowie's The Rise of the American Novel (1948), remains remarkable for the detailed attention it gives to a slew of authors who are only now receiving their due (Sally Wood, George Watterston, John Neal et al.), its critical judgments are clearly shaped by that prevailing mid-twentieth-century conception of early American fiction which Winfried Fluck has usefully dubbed “the infancy thesis.”Footnote ³ “For the dearth of good American literature during the first 150 or 200 years of the white history of the country, apology is needed less than explanation,” Cowie states in the first lines of his book. “A new nation, like a new-born baby, requires time before its special characteristics become discernible.”Footnote ⁴ Irrespective of the critic's other possible insights into early American fiction, by adopting the American Renaissance as the key marker of literary maturity, such an argument, as Davidson would later recognize, can only ever reinforce the scholarly insignificance of the post-Revolutionary novel.Footnote ⁵ What was so unusual about Revolution and the Word, in this regard, was that it took the early American novel at its own word. Once granted its own hermeneutical authority, the aesthetic dimension of the early American novel (which Cowie damns for its “poor characterization, loose motivation, graceless diversions, and generally careless structure”) could, in effect, be reunited with the particular political and cultural concerns of the moment in which these texts were first written.Footnote ⁶ Accordingly, while many subsequent critics may have questioned Davidson's emphasis on the early American novel as a politically subversive form, they have nonetheless shared her implicit debt to Ian Watt's The Rise of the Novel – and its influential treatment of eighteenth-century English fiction as “a matter not of literary criticism but social history” – rather than to Cowie's similarly titled work.Footnote ⁷

That no scholar of eighteenth-century American literature comprehensively applied Watt's historicist approach to the novel form before Davidson, however, tells its own story about the slow critical acceptance of the early American novel even within the field of Early American studies. By the middle of the twentieth century, that field was beginning to conspicuously mark out its terrain within the wider community of Americanists, buoyed both by recent trends in American intellectual history and by the increasing availability of pre-1800 imprints on microfilm, but its primary focus was on poetry and sermons, particularly of the Puritan variety.Footnote ⁸ Between its founding in 1965 and the appearance of Revolution and the Word, for example, Early American Literature, the house journal of this emergent subdiscipline, published just thirty-five articles on novels out of a total of nearly four hundred pieces (a ratio of less than 10 percent). As Philip F. Gura noted in a comprehensive survey of the field written in 1988, “in the past two decades the promotion of … popular culture has had few serious takers among scholars of early American literature” – “although,” he prophetically added, “as in the case of Cathy N. Davidson's recent work on late eighteenth-century fiction, they have begun to explore the issue.”Footnote ⁹ Indeed, following its first number in the year that Revolution and the Word was published, which not coincidentally featured an article by Davidson on Sukey Vickery, Early American Literature began to increasingly embrace research on the post-Revolutionary novel – to the point where last year's volume alone contained seven essays on the subject (around 50 percent of the annual total). Nor has the impact of Revolution and the Word been felt solely among Early Americanists, as the presence of pre-1820 fiction in dozens of anthologies and critical surveys, scores of monographs, and innumerable general literary journals published over the last thirty years can attest.

Essentially, the mixture of critical approaches that Davidson was able to draw on by the mid-1980s, which included post-structuralism and the histoire des mentalités alongside those already mentioned, allowed her to turn Cowie's embarrassed defence of the early American novel as “interesting chiefly for historical reasons” into a positive, and opened the door for her initial readers to understand the ostensible failures and incoherencies of the post-Revolutionary novel as evidence of ideological conflict, whether it be over the relationship between capitalism and democracy, the status of women, or the rights of the working classes.Footnote ¹⁰ Moreover, in the years that followed, other critical questions, such as those surrounding postcolonialism or race, entered the scholarly debate in ways, as Davidson herself observed in a lengthy new Introduction to a 2004 reissue of Revolution and the Word, that the book had sometimes anticipated and sometimes overlooked, but that were always in conversation with it.Footnote ¹¹ Another decade on, still other interpretive agendas have emerged, such as neo-formalism or transatlanticism, and still Revolution and the Word remains the lodestar for discussions of early American fiction.

On the occasion of Revolution and the Word's thirtieth birthday, then, it is only appropriate that a group of scholars currently working on the early American novel take the opportunity to use Davidson's book as a measure of developments in the field past, present, and future. In the pages that follow, Duncan Faherty, Matthew Pethers, Thomas Koenigs, Karen Weyler, Ed White, and Siân Silyn Roberts each take on one or two of Revolution and the Word's capacious chapters in order to critically assess where the study of early American fiction has been and where it may be going, before Cathy Davidson herself offers some final reflections on the writing of the book and its ongoing relevance. In the new Preface she wrote in 2004, Davidson described it as “a dialogue between myself as a critical reader … and the ‘author’ of Revolution and the Word who in 1986 had not been able to avail herself of the riches in scholarship available to the present author.”Footnote ¹² That dialogue continues in her contribution here, and it is joined – as it has been all along – by the voices of those who are indebted to her groundbreaking work.

INTRODUCTION: TOWARD A HISTORY OF TEXTS

Few scholars of early American literature would be surprised by the fact that Susanna Rowson is the first novelist Cathy Davidson mentions in her introduction to Revolution and the Word. Given Rowson's initial placement, few, too, would be startled to learn that Charles Brockden Brown is the second to appear or that Hannah Webster Foster is the fourth. While scarcely the canonized authors they have since become, Brown, Rowson, and Foster were hardly obscure figures when Davidson's book first appeared. By 1986, Sidney J. Krause and S. W. Reid were nearing the completion of the so-called “Bicentennial Editions” of Brown's novels, which they had inaugurated with a 1977 reissue of Wieland (1798); although none of Rowson's works were then available in a modern scholarly edition, Charlotte Temple (1794) had long been recognized as among the first successful US novels; and even Foster's The Coquette (1797) had intermittently received scholarly attention across the twentieth century. Since Revolution and the Word first appeared, this triumvirate has become the backbone of the early American canon and at least three different scholarly editions of each of these novels are currently available for course adoption. Yet, even now – three decades later – most scholars would struggle to identify anything written by the third novelist mentioned in Davidson's initial descriptions of the field, Helena Wells. Sadly, Wells suffers almost as much neglect today as she did when Davidson afforded her such a noteworthy position.Footnote ¹

Despite recent critical interest in registering the connections between the West Indies and the early republic (a critical turn which has helped reenergize the field), Wells's Constantia Neville, or The West Indian (1800) remains unknown to most Early Americanists. The story of the orphaned Constantia's entanglements with several possible suitors, Wells's novel features domestic jealousies, scandalous rumors, bankruptcies, a suicide, mental illness, and a mysterious admirer who lived with Native Americans for several years before returning to England. The text, in short, charts a large circumatlantic circuit from London to Chesterfield to Barbados to the interior of the North American West. Wells's first published novel, The Step-Mother (1798), meanwhile, revolves around the social anxieties of the eponymous heroine and her struggle to be an effective surrogate parent for the four daughters of the widowed sea captain she has married. The plot meditates compellingly on the politics of class identities, on the forging of networks of female solidarity, on the meanings of consangineous and nonbiological kinship, and on the complexities of companionate marriages, yet like Constantia Neville it abides only as yet one more ghostly entry in our dusty bibliographies of the early American novel. In effect, Wells embodies two significant challenges to our leading canonizing paradigms: as a southerner (born in South Carolina) and as the daughter of a prominent Loyalist (whose family repatriated to England), it remains difficult to taxonomize her work amid a canon framed around northeastern writers whose political sympathies (while complex) are hardly ever imagined as opposed to independence. As such, Wells's novels fail to appear on our canonical maps because of the restrictive ways in which we have elected to conceptualize the literary landscape.

Part of what was – and endures as – so powerful about the introductory methodological section which opens Revolution and the Word is Davidson's capacious scope and her promiscuous attention to texts and authors. Davidson was not bound by the same restrictive geographical horizons, delimited temporal frame, or political litmus tests which have surreptitiously resurfaced as defining tropes of early American canonization. While her study ranges from 1789 to 1820 (a period in which, as she notes early on, over a hundred domestically authored novels were first published), the field has coalesced around a handful of novels from the 1790s. This lingering temporal fixation on a single decade has mistakenly promulgated the notion that early American cultural production peaked in the decade after the Revolution and then waned until it was resuscitated by the rise of historical fiction in the 1820s. And this critical fixation on the period immediately after the ratification of the Constitution has also engendered the erroneous idea that the early American novel was largely a Revolutionary genre. Despite the fact that Davidson never advocated for either of these tenets, they have become – in the wake of Revolution and the Word – critical doxa.

Ed White's pointed encapsulation of the state of the field as one in which “the word is part of the revolution” helps us to understand why Brockden Brown has become so central and why Wells lingers as, at best, an unanimated revenant.Footnote ² Dozens of critical readings have situated Brown against some version of the 1790s paradigm, while circumscribing Wells within such contours would be almost impossible. Yet Davidson's initial frame proffers the two as coequal, presenting them as analogous early American writers notable for their shared understanding that their readers “for the most part read few books besides novels” (10). In essence, Davidson tries to articulate the ways in which both writers sought to locate themselves and their work within a moment when early American readers consumed novels of all kinds and did so (to a degree) at the expense of other forms of textual production. Instead of excommunicating Wells for failing to fulfill some codified set of predetermined concerns relating to geographic location or narrative themes, Davidson figures her as an important pivot for understanding the development of American literary culture.

Equally, we might consider the import of the fact that the first two early American novels which Davidson catalogs by their titles are Sukey Vickery's Emily Hamilton (1803) and Sarah Savage's The Factory Girl (1814). Remarkably, both of these novels are currently in print, although neither has garnered any sustained scholarly or pedagogical attention.Footnote ³ While these novels were significant fulcrums for Davidson, they have hardly ever been leveraged to purchase an expansive sense of US cultural production since her book first appeared. One key factor in the sustained neglect of these two suggestive texts again arises from their date of publication, which falls outside the overly privileged decade of the 1790s. Practically speaking, the only text published in the first decade of the nineteenth century which now routinely generates both critical and pedagogic interest is Leonora Sansay's Secret History; or The Horrors of St. Domingo (1808), which was first recovered by Michael Drexler in 2007. Sansay's novel, which Davidson does not mention, has allowed considerations of the impact of the Haitian Revolution to enter into debates about early American literary development, and, as such, its rapid canonization seems overdue, necessary, and unalterable. If Sansay's text serves as the exception which proves the rule about neglect of textual production in the first decade of the nineteenth century, however, as Davidson's attention to Savage and Vickery – and to Sansay's more straightforwardly sentimental Laura (1809) – suggests, this rule did not originate in, or animate, Revolution and the Word's “history of texts” or its sense of early American canonicity.

One of the least recognized aspects, and most underappreciated facets, of Davidson's book is that while she focusses on what she calls “the coemergence of the American novel with the nation,” she does not simply move to constellate interest in the immediate post-Revolutionary period (13). While the field has developed in such a way as to fetishize coemergence as the defining trope of the 1790s, Revolution and the Word had no interest in plotting such a restrictive temporal axis. Chief among the monumental contributions of Davidson's “history-of-texts” approach is its expansive appetite for novels themselves, its wanton attempt to revel in a multiplicity of plots, titles, and characters. At times, the sheer volume of its objects of inquiry becomes dizzying. Yet this method ensures that Davidson's claims emerge out of readings of dozens and dozens and dozens of texts and are not the by-product of close reading of a single object. Her method explores the ground cover, the understory, and the canopy, while we have sacrificed a deep sense of the forest because we have petrified a few particular trees. Amazingly, without the benefit of the research technologies we currently enjoy she enacted a kind of pre-digital distant reading and big-data gathering, and by returning to these methods we can perhaps liberate ourselves from our distorted sense of textual production. It would be a mistake to imagine that Revolution and the Word was simply invested in the roots of American literary development, because the text evinces a burgeoning interest in the routes of these novels as well. Revolution and the Word, in essence, moved to reconstruct the past cultural ecosystems in which these texts were produced, consumed, and preserved, even as it was conscious of the need to measure the effects of the sometimes glacial layering of new productions and branches. Davidson's method gazed at both the margins (and marginalia) and at the horizons of cultural production simultaneously.

Thirty years later the field needs a new revolution; thirty years later, we need a return to the brazen expansiveness of a book like Revolution and the Word. In some ways the digitization of archives has made such praxis easier to undertake, and without question expansion of textual access and availability has underscored the necessity of such a turn. Yet, at present, the field remains stifled by the force of the 1790s paradigm, by a reductive commitment to a prescribed geographical focus, and by a residual attachment to the radicalness of the emerging genre of the novel. We desperately need to embrace what Theresa Strouth Gaul has provocatively called the agenda of “recovering recovery,” and we need to do so guided by the knowledge that many of the editorial projects launched by the success of Revolution and the Word eventually folded because the texts being reissued failed to find their way into enough classrooms to sustain their reproduction.Footnote ⁴ We need, too, to heed the insightful warnings offered by Michelle Burnham in her generative essay “Literary Recovery in an Age of Austerity,” and particularly her observation that “it seems painfully ironic … that the easier it has become to locate and access once-forgotten literary texts through electronic databases and other digital resources, the harder it has become to get those texts into print.”Footnote ⁵ This systemic problem hampers pedagogical innovation and scholarly production in untold ways. Thirty years on from Revolution and the Word we find ourselves in a hauntingly regressive position in terms of what is and what is not available in traditional print formats.

The revolution we need can begin, as my fellow contributors argue in these pages, by decentering the novel as our most revered object of inquiry, and by thinking more seriously about anonymity, pseudonymity, and serialization. It must also consider how networks of reprinting never adhered to the constraints of national borders or copyright laws, in ways that will broaden our geographical horizons beyond the idea of the northeast-as-the-nation (and beyond the frame of the nation itself). This revolution needs to forsake residual ideas about widespread notions of democratic social mobility, and grapple with the class anxieties and the tensions over social hierarchies which suffuse so much early American fiction. And, most importantly, this revolution cannot be successful until we account more fully for the presence of diasporic Africans and indigenous peoples in early American texts. Now, thirty years later, we still have much to learn from the revolutionary potential of Revolution and the Word.

CHAPTER 2: THE BOOK IN THE NEW REPUBLIC CHAPTER 5: COMMODITY AND COMMUNICATION: THE FIRST AMERICAN NOVEL

In 1986, when Cathy Davidson's Revolution and the Word, and its revelatory second chapter on “The Book in the New Republic,” first appeared, the field of American book history was but a glimmer in the eye of a few open-minded cultural historians who had access to the American Antiquarian Society, were reading Robert Darnton and Rezeptionsästhetik, and recalled the work of Rollo G. Silver or Lawrence Wroth. Thirty years later the central concerns of book history – principally a focus on the production, distribution, and reception of texts – are so embedded in Early American studies as to sometimes seem invisible. In the particular case of scholarship on the early American novel, however, this invisibility often has as much to do with the absence of such methodologies as with their familiarity. Although we certainly know more than ever before about the circulation of Susanna Rowson's Charlotte Temple (1794) or Charles Brockden Brown's relations with his publishers, and some new work has been emerging on topics like periodical fiction and illustration, gaping holes in our understanding of the novel's place within the Revolutionary-era book trade remain.Footnote ¹ There are many possible reasons for this neglect: an inability or unwillingness to replicate Davidson's heroic archival research, exacerbated by digitization's tendency to offer an illusion of completeness while instantiating one copy or edition of a book as the definitive text; a desire to privilege Davidson's political interpretation of the novel form over her material analysis of it, exacerbated by the New Americanist penchant for “paranoid reading”; or a reluctance to accept Davidson's emphasis on the novel as didactic and anonymous rather than romantic and self-expressive, exacerbated by the lingering power of the American Renaissance in determining the story of American literature's ascent. Whatever the case, it is evident that Davidson's second chapter represents something of an anomaly in regard to the influence of Revolution and the Word. For despite being perhaps the most important chapter in propelling Revolution and the Word into the hands of an audience beyond that composed of Early Americanists, within the scholarly arena of early American fiction itself its insights have too rarely been taken up.

Such an assertion might seem hyperbolic given the ubiquity of discussions of “print culture” in Early American studies since the mid-1990s. But there are significant differences between the issues addressed in Davidson's second chapter and those addressed in these discussions that a crude tendency to conflate “print” and “book” obscures. Michael Warner's much-cited The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America, for example, which arrived just four years after Revolution and the Word, takes as its central concern the “uses of print discourse” – that is, the epistemologies and rhetoric generated by or surrounding a text's materiality.Footnote ² Davidson herself is, of course, interested in such questions too, as her third chapter (on “Ideology and Genre”) makes abundantly clear. But crucially she anchors these questions in her preceding analysis of print runs, library records, book sizes, purchase prices, copyright law, mechanical innovation, and typography. In most studies of “print culture,” on the other hand, marginalia are eschewed for meta-textuality, actual readers disappear into imagined communities, and printers are ignored in favour of metaphorical presses. By reversing the McLuhanite argument that “the medium is the message,” these studies have offered an important corrective to neo-Whiggish, techno-determinist histories of the book – yet in doing so they have too often abjured the empirical insights of book history altogether. Consequently, Warner's Letters of the Republic, like many of its heirs, offers an otherwise compelling account of the early American novel “as figuring, in theme and in fantasy, culturally dominant assumptions and desires about the value of printed goods,” while perplexingly saying nothing about the actual, cash-in-hand value of those novels.Footnote ³

Nonetheless, if Davidson's concern for the early American novel “as material fact and economic entity” has been somewhat eclipsed during the last three decades, the ways in which this interpretive approach might be recovered and extended can be intuited (15). The University of North Carolina's monumental, five-volume A History of the Book in America (2007–14), for example, both underlines the patchiness of book-historical work on the early American novel and points toward questions that could reenergize and reorient this line of inquiry. In this respect, although the first two volumes of the series, which cover the colonial period to 1840, may only devote a few very short chapters and a scattered handful of pages to the early American novel, two significant conclusions can still be drawn from this material. The first is that the American trade in novels was overwhelmingly dominated by imports and reprints of English fiction until well into the middle of the nineteenth century. The second is that even as American-produced novels began to appear more regularly they had to compete strenuously for a place in the market with other genres of popular writing, from conduct books and biographies to travel narratives and magazines. Taken together, these embryonic insights in fact expose the conceptual circumference of Davidson's second chapter, as well as the limitations of the “print-culture” approach to early American fiction. For in both Revolution and the Word and its kissing cousins, the novel form tends to be associated with a nationalistic–liberal mode of textual consumption that represents a triumphantly radical break with the literature of the colonial past – a narrative that the emphasis on continuities and multiplicities in recent book history on the Revolutionary era challenges.

What exactly, then, might a greater appreciation of the Anglophilia and the inter-genericity of the American trade in novels do to our prevailing understandings of the field? Well, one – inevitably brief – answer can be offered by turning to Davidson's fifth chapter, in which she considers the competing claimants to the title of “the first American novel.” Here the verdict on that long-standing debate is essentially twofold: if the criterion is one of critical attention and canonization it is Charles Brockden Brown who has been “accorded a de facto status as ‘first major novelist’,” while if a slightly different set of criteria is applied – “written in America, by an author born in America, published first in America, set in America, [and] concerned with issues that are specifically grounded in the new country and not simply transported from England” – then William Hill Brown's The Power of Sympathy (1789) has typically been accepted as the earliest American novel (84, 85). Characteristically, Davidson is astute enough to recognize the fault lines in both arguments. Brockden Brown's election to the role becomes “puzzling,” she notes, when we consider that he “was neither literally first nor the first to support himself by his pen” (84). And as she suggests in her title to this chapter she is alert to how The Power of Sympathy's primacy is a result of the way in which it has been “commoditized and institutionalized” by a range of biased investors, from the patriotic publisher of the first edition, Isaiah Thomas, to the magazine editor who republished it to great fanfare in the mid-1890s, Arthur W. Braley (84). Yet, for all these caveats, Revolution and the Word ultimately supports the anteriority of the two Browns – not least by devoting most of the fifth chapter to a close reading of Sympathy, and by rounding out the final chapter with an extended reading of Arthur Mervyn (1799–1800). In each instance, the implicit (and sometimes even explicit) rationale for this emphasis is that the novel in question represents a key point of maturation for the early American novel. Certainly, anyway, this is how most later scholars have chosen to regard the matter. The sensational gothicism of Brown's work and its openness to diverse political readings, for example, have ensured that the amount of criticism and the number of editions dedicated to him have continued to increase exponentially since the 1980s, while a significant uptake of interest in sentimental literature, driven at various stages by feminist academics, analysts of liberal individualism, and theorists of affect alike, has helped The Power of Sympathy to remain an irresistible starting point.

Nonetheless, a crucial difference between Revolution and the Word and its heirs remains in Davidson's greater attention to the constructedness and provisionality of “origin” narratives. Indeed, it is perhaps a mark of durable scholarly works that they offer tools for alternative readings of their subjects, even as single strands of their argument inevitably become overworn through popularization. In regard to her assertions over the “first American novel,” for instance, Davidson consistently reminds the reader that “all etiologic studies assume a development that has already taken place, and the investigator inevitably posits origins congruent with the development that can be documented as following from those origins – the tautology of history which is as inescapable as the historian's place in history” (12, original emphasis). Taking Revolution and the Word's commitment to a model of “dialogical history” at its word thus allows us to use Davidson's methodologies to apprehend “a choice of pasts,” each dependent upon our own critical preoccupations and historical moment (256).

In the case of my emphasis on the Anglophiliac inter-genericity of the early American novel the most obvious frame of reference is the transatlantic perspective on American literature that has been blooming since the mid-1990s, largely from a confluence of wider debates over post-nationalism and globalization. Appearing over a decade before these intellectual concerns took the Americanist community by storm, Revolution and the Word had a very different agenda. Stressing her interest in recovering a much-neglected and distinctively American corpus of novels, for example, Davidson unapologetically declares in her opening chapter that “I do not examine the early American novel in comparison with British models. Everyone knows that the first American fiction imitated earlier British originals, but we are not so sure just what that means” (10). In fact, the hermeneutic power of the nation-state that is in evidence here proved difficult to escape even for many transatlanticists. Although considerably more invested in determining what the British influence on American fiction meant, for instance, the postcolonial approaches that helped to kick-start the transatlantic turn did not always stray that far from Davidson's work. Revolution and the Word is, after all, a book about how a new nation sought to define its literary identity in opposition to the culture of an empire it had departed, notwithstanding the absence in its pages of the theoretical vocabulary of postcolonial studies. Consequently, there are times when Davidson's denigration of the “conventional concept of imitation” (10) as a means of interpreting early American fiction anticipates the emphasis of a critic like Edward Watts, whose Writing and Postcolonialism in the Early Republic focusses on the “process of decolonization” that post-Revolutionary novelists enacted by “disrupting inherited modes of representation” in order to “place the reader … at the center of an American experience, not on the margin of British culture.”Footnote ⁴ In certain important respects, then, the postcolonial phase of Early American studies has not got us any closer to understanding the continuing appeal of British novels or British novelistic tropes for late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Americans. Instead, it is only now, some twenty years into the transatlantic turn, that critics are really beginning to seriously address the Anglophilia of the post-Revolutionary literary scene.

One particularly noteworthy manifestation of this address is Leonard Tennenhouse's The Importance of Feeling English, which deploys a “diasporic” model of early American culture in order to argue that “during the period from 1750–1850 American authors were more interested in producing and consuming English literature than in creating … ‘a literature of their own.’”Footnote ⁵ Tennenhouse's analysis has its own conceptual limitations, not least because it shirks book history and continues to overprivilege the 1790s, but pushing its essential premise forward will undoubtedly help scholars to get to grips with the full breadth and complexity of the early American trade in novels. Consider, for instance, some of the implications that a diasporic approach to American fiction has for the three key terms identified in the subtitle of Revolution and the Word (“rise,” “novel,” and “America”).

As the title of a recent survey of US fiction between 1789 and 1900 by Philip F. Gura – Truth's Ragged Edge: The Rise of the American Novel (2013) – might suggest, a “rise” metaphor (that was originally popularized by Ian Watt's 1957 study of eighteenth-century British fiction) continues to influence accounts of the novel's emergence and development thirty years after Revolution and the Word, notwithstanding the well-grounded objections that have periodically been levelled at it. Gura, for his part, falls into almost all of the historiographical traps that this analogy lays down: the American novel, in Truth's Ragged Edge, is an autonomous, self-generating mode of writing that inevitably and ineluctably accelerates from its feeble birth in the 1790s to robust adulthood in the 1850s. Importantly, however, other scholars have begun to substantiate the suspicion of teleological narratives that Davidson herself entertains. Thus Dawn Coleman's Preaching and the Rise of the American Novel persuasively makes a case for “the slow rise of the novel in America” by stressing the persistence of anti-fictional discourses long into the 1850s, while Trish Loughran's The Republic in Print (2009) compellingly positions both The Power of Sympathy and its mid-nineteenth-century successors within an intensely localized series of book markets that expanded at varying speeds.Footnote ⁶

Still, even the most transatlanticist of these rethinkings of a unilinear “rise” have tended, like The Importance of Feeling English, to default to the 1790s as the moment when the ascension of the novel in America begins. Laura Doyle's chronologically ambitious 2008 book Freedom's Empire: Race and the Rise of the Novel in Atlantic Modernity, 1640–1940, for instance, offers us some refreshing new angles on Charles Brockden Brown and Susanna Rowson by putting them into direct conversation with Daniel Defoe, but it is still Brown and Rowson who serve as the parents of the American novel here. What no one has yet devoted any sustained empirical or theoretical attention to is the fact that Defoe, and a bevy of other British novelists besides, were being widely read decades before the usual American suspects put pen to paper. If we make, in short, a more rigorous distinction between “the novel in America” and “the American novel” (wherein the former is not just a synonym for the latter), then it becomes clear that the novel had already risen by the time that most “rise” narratives begin. In order to fully grasp the significance of the 782 “Books of Entertainment” that the Philadelphian bookseller James Rivington advertised in his 1762 catalogue, or the “abundance of novels” available on the shelves of the Union Library Company in 1765, we must first escape the monolithic shadow that 1776 casts on discussion of early American fiction.Footnote ⁷ But if we can surmount the dubious assumption that the American novel could only come into being as a result of the American Revolution (an assumption generously abetted by The Power of Sympathy's ostensible “firstness”), it may be possible to answer some fundamental questions that have never been adequately addressed.

One of these fundamental questions is precisely why, in Davidson's words, “there were no indigenous novels before the American Revolution” (vii). Moving beyond the cursory gestures most scholars have made to constraints on publishing and reading practices during the colonial era to a detailed analysis of the pre-Revolutionary book market's handling of fiction would help to provide some fuller explanations here. But such a move would also help to reveal that, contrary to received opinion, a host of American novels were in fact being produced before 1776 – if only we could adjust our perceptions to the more fluid and contested meanings of the term “novel” across the eighteenth century. In this respect, as Ed White argued in 2003, “the neglect of genre criticism in early American studies” – which variously stems from “a tradition that focuses on theme, image, and national consciousness at the expense of form; a related defensiveness about the aesthetic quality of early American letters; … [and] a contemporary association of formal criticism with an apolitical conservatism” – has “diminished early American literary history, [by] rendering it profoundly empiricist and removing it from … important debates about the cultural origins and significance of the novel.”Footnote ⁸ Indeed, it remains startling that no American equivalents to morphological studies of the emergence of the English novel like Lennard Davis's Factual Fictions (1983) or J. Paul Hunter's Before Novels (1990) have yet been written. There may be light on the horizon, however, in the shape of a nascent formalist turn within Early American studies, and – once again – glints from the backcountry, in the shape of Davidson's persistent (if undervalued) attention to issues of genre. Pooling the mutual debt of Revolution and the Word and, say, Matthew Garrett's more recent Episodic Poetics (2014) to the theories of Bakhtin and Jameson will surely help to decentre monolithic definitions of “the novel” in two important ways – first, by allowing us to recategorize those works of American fiction, like Hugh Henry Brackenridge and Philip Freneau's Father Bombo's Pilgrimage (1770) or Francis Hopkinson's A Pretty Story (1774) that have typically been deemed too short, too fragmented, or too factual to count as novels, and second, by allowing us to return the early American novel to the ceaseless dialogue it carried on with manifold other modes of writing. The implications of such a disruption of our generic certainties for the canonical status of The Power of Sympathy should be clear: as my choice of Father Bombo and A Pretty Story as examples implies, the confining “firstness” of Brown's novel would be radically challenged, and, as the work of critics like Leonard Tennenhouse and Jared Gardner has already indicated, reading sentimental fiction as subordinate to and constituted by other genres such as the captivity narrative or the periodical could render Brown's novel the end point rather than the origins of a literary tradition.Footnote ⁹

Significantly, Davidson is mindful of the generic indeterminacies within The Power of Sympathy. Its “incongruities and disjunctions” are so pervasive, she argues, “that at times it almost seems as if we have two distinct and even contradictory discourses, a didactic essay and a novel, shuffled together and bound as one book” (98, 99). But in the end her adoption of narrowly nationalistic criteria for determining the parameters of “the American novel” (that is, it must be written, published, and set within the United States) directs Revolution and the Word away from the full ramifications of this insight. Despite acknowledging William C. Spengemann's existing riposte “that it is both insular and ahistorical to develop a model of … an ‘American tradition’ based solely on books written in America,” for instance, Davidson swerves this by reiterating that “I am leaving the European connections of American fiction to other scholars specifically interested in that topic” (11). Pursuing the Anglophiliac tendencies of the early American book market, on the other hand, has the potential to expand the domain of what counts as “American” fiction, and complicate the genealogy of the New World novel, in ways that even transatlanticists have so far ignored. For while the latter have been enormously adept in tracing the interconnection between novels written on different sides of the Atlantic, they have still largely clung to the criteria of (authorial and material) nation of birth in order to determine which cultural tradition a text sits in. This is a dialectical model of literary history that never achieves synthesis, wherein a novel like Charlotte Lennox's The Life and Adventures of Harriot Stuart (1750) remains resolutely “English” despite being about America and circulating widely there. Fortunately, however, there are signs that Spengemann's prophetic call “for a better way to define works of American literature” in “The Earliest American Novel: Aphra Behn's Oronooko” – “better, that is, than … merely determining that the author was, according to some elastic political definition, American” – are, finally, being heeded.Footnote ¹⁰ Thus recent work by Jeffrey H. Richards, Melissa J. Homestead, and Eve Tavor Bannet has begun the mission of recovering the full breadth and complexity of pre-1776 fiction set in and available to the American colonies – a body of writing we might describe, pace Spengemann, as “the earlier American novel.”Footnote ¹¹

As with the interrogation of established definitions of “rising” and “novelism,” the key to unlocking new understandings of “Americanness” is held by an emphasis on Anglophiliac inter-genericity, and it must be tied to the fob of book history. In excusing her inattention to transatlanticism in Revolution and the Word, Davidson notes that “any adequate study of the influence of English fiction on the emerging American novel would be at least as extensive as the present work” since “a full investigation of the whole matter would depend on a detailed study of precisely what British books were read in America, in what numbers, [and] by whom” (10). And the time has surely come for that task to be fulfilled. Yet in carrying out this assignment we would be foolhardy indeed to ignore the enduring insights and potent methodologies put in place by Davidson. Moving discussion of the early American novel to a place before and beyond The Power of Sympathy will not involve moving away from Revolution and the Word, but rather extending its reach in a new direction.

CHAPTER 3: IDEOLOGY AND GENRE CHAPTER 4: LITERACY, EDUCATION, AND THE READER

Chapter 3 of Revolution and the Word stands as one of the book's most influential – and most enduringly controversial – chapters. Drawing on the work of Fredric Jameson, Davidson here seeks to recover the “the force that fiction itself was perceived to have as an ideology” in the early republic (40). Davidson's groundbreaking methodological move was shifting the focus from the ideology espoused by a particular novel or novelist to the “ideological position that the novel as a genre was perceived to take in the aftermath of the Revolutionary War” (39, original emphasis). In a convincing reading of the early republic's pervasive anti-fictional discourse, she argues that the novel was regarded as a threat to the ascendant social hierarchy and to both civic and religious establishments. In conservative responses to the novel, Davidson finds evidence for the genre's association with a form of democratic experience far more inclusive than that imagined by either the Constitution or republican elites – “the novel form,” she writes, “validated individual identities and championed equality” (52).

Over the past three decades, myriad studies have expanded on this central insight, further developing how the novel genre might fulfill this democratizing function. The chapter's lasting impact, however, is perhaps most evident in the many accounts of the early American novel that have been framed as a response to this argument. Scholars have challenged both Davidson's account of the novel genre's specific “ideological position” in the new republic and her premise that the genre could be assigned a stable ideological position at all.Footnote ¹ But while subsequent studies have often rejected Revolution and the Word's central claims, or even insisted that the book posed the wrong questions, the network of concerns with which its early chapters grapple continues to preoccupy scholars of early national literature. The book's fourth chapter, for instance, on “Literacy, Education, and the Reader,” takes as its object the relationship between genre and reading practices – an issue that remains at the center not only of much current scholarship on early American novels, but also of American literary studies more broadly (most notably in recent work on “historical poetics”).Footnote ² What chapter 4 particularly underscores is how Davidson's rigorously varied methodological approach – drawing on book history, reception studies, genre theory, extended readings of texts, and especially archival work on marginalia – anticipates, and even encapsulates in miniature, the (broadly historicist) methodological pluralism of our current moment of literary studies.

Within the more limited frame of novel history and theory, Revolution and the Word's early chapters have also been prophetic, anticipating the turn to fictionality that has followed the publication of Catherine Gallagher's landmark essay “The Rise of Fictionality.” Arguing for the novelty of novelistic fictionality – she strikingly claims that “the novel discovered fictionality” in the eighteenth century – Gallagher drew attention to this most “obvious” yet most “easily ignored” characteristic of the novel, thereby recovering fictionality as an object of analysis for literary historians (rather than narratologists and philosophers of language).Footnote ³ Cathy Davidson, however, had never ignored fictionality. Decades before Gallagher's intervention, Revolution and the Word undertook the project of unpacking how the fictional mode structured readers’ encounters with narratives and how it allowed the novel to perform a unique educative function in modern society. In many ways, Revolution and the Word's third and fourth chapters resonate as a prescient account of what we might now call – following Richard Walsh and others – “the rhetoric of fictionality” in the early republic: the way in which fictionality changed how readers related to texts by, in Davidson's words, “assert[ing] the primacy of the individual as reader and the legitimacy of that reader's perceptions and responses” (52).Footnote ⁴

Published twenty years apart, Davidson's book and Gallagher's essay have a surprising amount to say to each other. On one hand, Gallagher's more singular focus on fictionality can help give a greater precision to many of Davidson's more general claims about how the novel educated readers in the early republic. On the other, Davidson's account of the American contestations over fiction reveals a significant blind spot in Gallagher's literary-historical narrative. Most notably, Gallagher reads the prevalence of “founded-in-fact” narratives in the new republic as evidence that fictionality “seems to have been but faintly understood in the infant United States.”Footnote ⁵ But Davidson's attention to the “ideological position” of fiction in the early US reveals less an early American misunderstanding of the form than a struggle for social legitimacy that played out through such novelistic truth-claims. In fact, Davidson reads the most virulent critiques of fiction not as evidence of a failure to understand fiction, but as revealing an insightful, even prophetic, understanding of fiction's democratizing power. Her account of how Royall Tyler's The Algerine Captive (1797) exposes “the fictionality of history,” for example, even suggests how the contestation over novels in the young republic would have made early American writers especially attuned to the theoretical questions bound up with fictionality (202).

Equally, when we approach Revolution and the Word in terms of Gallagher's more explicit focus on fictionality, it is striking how many of the claims that Davidson makes for the novel, and especially its educative function, hinge on the genre's fictionality. Revolution and the Word, for instance, extensively explores how sentimental novels, such as Hannah Webster Foster's The Coquette (1797), allowed readers to mentally experiment with different courtship possibilities. This particular mode of didactic experimentation requires exactly the kind of speculative reasoning and cognitive provisionality that, as Gallagher points out, are elicited by fictionality itself: the process of reading fiction – narratives that elicit judgment in terms of possibility or probability rather than factuality – trains readers in precisely the kind of suppositional logic needed to negotiate the crises recounted within these fictional narratives. Drawing out how the cognitive processes required by fictionality took on a new importance in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world – in arenas ranging from bourgeois courtship to the speculative economy – Gallagher's essay affirms Davidson's insight about the novel's unique ability to prepare readers for modern social life and provides an even more precise account of why this genre was peculiarly suited to the educative challenges of the early US.

But what I especially want to consider here is how, given their shared interest in novelistic fictionality, critiques of Gallagher's essay might resonate with Revolution and the Word's ongoing influence in American studies and point to new directions in the analysis of early national fiction. Recent work on the history of fiction in both England and France has particularly challenged Gallagher's delimited understanding of fictionality, with scholars from a variety of perspectives expressing dissatisfaction with her narrow equation of fictionality and the novel genre. Nicholas Paige, for example, has argued that Gallagher's approach overlooks eighteenth-century novelistic forms, such as the “pseudofactual” novels of Defoe and Rousseau, that do not conform to the conventions of realist fiction(ality) that became ascendant in the nineteenth century.Footnote ⁶ And similarly, Srinivas Aravamudan's Enlightenment Orientalism draws attention to the wide range of fictional forms circulating in eighteenth-century England and France, such as the beast fable and the oriental tale, that Gallagher's narrow focus on novelistic fictionality overlooks.Footnote ⁷ While differing widely in their emphases, these critiques dovetail in highlighting the inadequacy of any totalizing account of the “Rise of Fictionality” or an equation of fiction with the novel. Both scholars identify a teleological strand in Gallagher's argument, in which novelistic fictionality – in its consolidated, conventionalized, nineteenth-century form – comes to obscure earlier forms of both the novel genre (in Paige's account) and other forms of fictionality (in Aravamudan's). Both critics advocate replacing monolithic “rise” narratives with accounts of fiction's emergence that attend to the diversity of competing novelistic and fictional forms.

While Revolution and the Word does not explicitly equate fiction with the novel genre, the terms operate largely as synonyms in Davidson's argument.Footnote ⁸ For this reason, I think, these critiques of Gallagher usefully point to a diversity of novelistic and fictional forms that Davidson's influential emphasis on the (implicitly fictional) novel genre might obfuscate. What would it mean to take seriously – as suggested by Paige's work – the idea that the “founded-in-fact” novels of the early republic are not fictional (or at least not fictional in the same way as other novels)? Davidson treats these “truth-claims” as conventions that do not bear substantially on the text. “For all the protestations of being ‘FOUNDED IN TRUTH,’ a novel was still a novel,” she concludes (262). But in what ways might our understanding of the early American novel change if we consider more fully how the different forms of fictional, nonfictional, and pseudofactual address found in texts that name themselves as novels shape readerly encounters with these narratives?

Or if we follow Aravamudan, how might our understanding of early American fiction change if we look beyond the novel genre? This might not seem immediately relevant to Revolution and the Word, as it is professedly a study of the “rise of the novel” in America. Yet, as Davidson herself notes, many of the texts that she treats as novels explicitly disavow and insist on their distinction from the novel genre. (To describe this phenomenon, Davidson even coins the term “nonnovel” (100)). What would it mean to take these claims to generic differentiation seriously – to treat these moves of generic distinction as an essential part of their address to readers? Davidson eloquently – and definitively – challenges the tendency to read early American fiction through the works of the “American Renaissance,” but I suspect that there is a similar privileging of later nineteenth-century paradigms in the consolidation of diverse prose fictions (and some not explicitly fictional texts) under the generic umbrella of the novel. Teleological “rise” narratives retrospectively normalize the incredible generic variety of early American fiction.

Of course, even as we try to get beyond “rise” narratives, the problem of generic classification for early prose fiction is a thorny one. After all, republican critics of fiction and the novel often lumped both together under the pejorative labels of “novels” or “romances,” while the authors themselves often insisted that they were either writing fictions that were not novels or novels that were not fiction. For this reason, I think our studies of early American fictionality need to rely less on theories of literature that understand genre in terms of taxonomic categories, and instead focus on genre as a mode of address. There is a model for this not only in the recent work in historical poetics I have already mentioned, but also in early American literature itself. In William Hill Brown's The Power of Sympathy (1789), for instance, the character of Mrs. Holmes, in presenting a young woman with a work of fiction, adds an important qualification: “I do not recommend it to you as a Novel, but as a work that speaks the language of the heart and that inculcates the duty that we owe to ourselves, to society and the Deity.”Footnote ⁹ While admitting that novels are more engaging than “didactick essays,” she nonetheless encourages the young woman to approach this narrative as she would an essay, in order to be “capable of deducing the most profitable lessons” from the text.Footnote ¹⁰ In insisting that she does not recommend the narrative “as a Novel,” Mrs. Holmes understands genre not as a text's internal characteristic but as something that is determined by the reader's approach to the text. I think we can approach the claims to generic difference in early American novels and fiction in similar terms: as attempts to elicit a specific readerly approach to these works. Within that capacious body of writing that we consider novels, we confront a remarkable variety of novelistic and nonnovelistic modes of address – of fictional and nonfictional forms – each serving a distinct rhetorical purpose.

This seems to me to a potentially generative next step in the study of early American novels and fiction: in addition to recovering the varied ideological work performed by the texts that Davidson discusses, we might recover the range of fictional forms that we have consolidated or collapsed together by privileging the novel as a category. Uncovering the varied rhetorics of fictionality that have been obscured by “rise-of-the-novel” narratives strikes me as a project very much in line with the wider spirit of Revolution and the Word, a capacious literary history that does not shy away from the bewildering diversity of early American print culture. In fact, getting beyond a focus on the novel's “rise” will help us continue to grapple with the questions that are this book's most enduring legacy: what was the role of fiction in educating early American readers, and especially women? How did fiction encourage different reading practices than other genres of early national print culture? How did writers use fiction to intervene in republican political life? And, above all, what did it mean to read fiction in the early republic?

CHAPTER 6: PRIVILEGING THE FEME COVERT: THE SOCIOLOGY OF SENTIMENTAL FICTION

To stage a revolution, you need both texts and tools. Cathy Davidson shrewdly gave scholars of early America both. Her work in Revolution and the Word and her near-simultaneous publication in 1987 of editions of Susanna Rowson's Charlotte Temple (1791) and Hannah Foster's The Coquette (1797), the introductions to which extended the arguments of her monograph, helped to facilitate access to early American sentimental novels, and gave scholars the theoretical and conceptual tools to make them legible, at a time when they were otherwise largely inaccessible. While Davidson was not single-handedly responsible for the revival of sentimental fiction, her impact on the field of Early American studies is undeniable. Any scholar in this field writing in the post-Revolution and the Word era has had to navigate in its daunting wake.

Sentimental fiction was ripe for revival in the late 1980s and the 1990s. A potent mix of cultural studies, feminist theory, reader-response criticism, New Historicism, and history of the book was emerging, all of which helped to make the texts that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American women wrote and liked to read more intelligible to modern audiences. Other critics were simultaneously working in different directions and sometimes different periods on the challenges of sentimental fiction: Mary Kelley in Private Woman, Public Stage (1984), Janice Radway in Reading the Romance (1984), Jane Tompkins in Sensational Designs (1985), Nancy Armstrong in Desire and Domestic Fiction (1987), and Gillian Brown in Domestic Individualism (1990), to name just a few. But Davidson's work dramatically accelerated this sentimental recovery with respect to early American fiction. Between 1986 and 2016, early sentimental novels have leapt from the out-of-print margins to become core texts in the scholarly and teaching canons of American literature.

In rereading Revolution and the Word, I was struck anew by how astonishingly good Davidson is at telling a story. In her sixth chapter alone, she brilliantly twines together women's history, marriage law, history of the book, and reader-response theory to explore the appeal of sentimental fiction to early republican writers and readers. In this regard, her monograph and her novel editions worked together to explicate two underlying principles that would make the work of Rowson and Foster – as well as later sentimental novels such as Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) – comprehensible to modern readers. First, breaking with earlier literary histories of the novel that were largely dismissive of the sentimental mode, Davidson's work reappraised the affective dimensions of sentimentality, taking it on its own terms rather than refracting it through a modernist lens skeptical of emotion. Her work inspired scholars to reevaluate the relationship between feelings and their bodily manifestations. Subsequent scholarship, in particular that of Julia Stern in The Plight of Feeling: Sympathy and Dissent in the Early American Novel (1997) and Elizabeth Barnes in States of Sympathy: Seduction and Democracy in the American Novel (1997), has continued to expand our understanding of the sentimental mode and its relation to sympathy and sensibility. Second, explaining the legal, social, and cultural constraints and privileges sustained by early American women enabled readers to understand why courtship and marriage are central to so many sentimental stories from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The issues raised by the fact that marriage in the British colonies and the early United States was a contract that bound men and women unequally would remain defining features of sentimental fiction through the 1820s and beyond, even as novels begin imagining singleness as a productive (if not reproductive) state. Encouraged to appreciate the overwhelming concern of sentimental texts with coverture and marriage settlements more deeply, scholars of early America were drawn to a range of newly recovered novels – not only Charlotte Temple and The Coquette, but also William Hill Brown's The Power of Sympathy (1789) and several others that appeared in the Oxford Early American Women Writers series under Davidson's general editorship, most notably Rebecca Rush's Kelroy (1812).

There are several metrics by which we might measure the influence of the sixth chapter of Revolution and the Word. Scholarship on early sentimental fiction has become something of a cottage industry in American studies, appearing not just in Anglo-American journals but also in European and Japanese publications, with dozens of articles and book chapters published each year that take this mode of writing seriously. Scholars have, moreover, moved beyond the core sentimental texts upon which Davidson focusses to write about the ways in which Tabitha Tenney's Female Quixotism (1801), Sally Wood's Julia, and the Illuminated Baron (1800) and Dorval; or, the Speculator (1801), Sukey Vickery's Emily Hamilton (1803), Rebecca Rush's Kelroy, and the anonymous Amelia, or the Faithless Briton (1798) likewise engage with sentimentality. Perhaps the most interesting metric of the triumph of sentimental fiction, and Davidson's enduring influence, however, may be how those texts have come to dominate undergraduate and graduate course syllabi. In this respect, the Open Syllabus Project allows us to access fascinating data about the ways these texts are taught.Footnote ¹ The Coquette and Charlotte Temple, for instance, are evidently most often taught on syllabi that include Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography (1771–90) and Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861). Undoubtedly these text combinations lead to fascinating and enlightening conversations for students about the differences in legal, social, and economic opportunities open to early American women and men, both black and white.

Charlotte Temple, meanwhile, appears to be the most frequently taught early American novel, followed closely by The Coquette, and, at some distance, Charles Brockden Brown's Wieland (1798) and William Hill Brown's The Power of Sympathy. Yet the scholarly output on early American sentimental texts still does not equal that produced on the novels of Brockden Brown, in part because early American sentimental fiction has become a somewhat Balkanized field. Most often early American sentimental novels are put into conversation among themselves, whereas Brown's novels are more likely to be put into dialogue with the works of Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, or Cooper. That is, discussions of early American sentimental fiction tend to read horizontally, while Brown's work is understood vertically, as anticipating later male novelists writing in gothic or historical modes. Equally, too, Rowson and Foster's major novels are often taken to stand in not only for their other fiction, but for the “sentimental novel” as a whole. If further evidence for the domination of Charlotte Temple and The Coquette on American literature syllabi were needed, it emerges from the number of classroom editions available. All the major academic publishers have invested in nicely edited contextual editions of one or other of these titles. Charlotte Temple, for example, appears in Oxford, Penguin, Norton, and Bedford editions, while The Coquette appears in Oxford, Penguin, Norton, Broadview, and Dover editions, and both appear in a number of low-cost digital reprints of earlier editions.

It is tremendously exciting to have the same kinds of edition choice for women's novels that we have for such canonical staples as The Scarlet Letter (1850) or Moby-Dick (1851), but these editions of Temple and The Coquette compete against one another, while other sentimental texts remain inaccessible. Scholarly infrastructure, which Susan Belasco identifies as “the basic tools that enable works of analysis and criticism: letters, standard editions, bibliographies, and biographies,” is crucial to the future study of sentimentality.Footnote ² While I have found the digital editions produced by the Just Teach One project and its companion, Just Teach One Early African American Print, innovative and energizing for my own teaching, Theresa Strouth Gaul's comments on the problems of textual recovery bear repeating at length:

In the meantime, Broadview and Early American Reprints (headed by Richard Pressman) are to be applauded for offering some alternatives: Broadview's list includes Rowson's Reuben and Rachel (1798), Leonora Sansay's Secret History (1808), and a transitional text between early and antebellum sentimental fiction, Catharine Maria Sedgwick's Clarence (1830), while Early American Reprints offers Tabitha Tenney's Female Quixotism, Rebecca Rush's Kelroy, and Martha Meredith Read's Margaretta (1807).

Even should other editions become more readily available, however, certain conceptual limitations need to be addressed. In the thirty years since the publication of Revolution and the Word, for instance, most scholarship has focussed on early American sentimental novels, rather than sentimental fictions. In the eighteenth century, “novel” was a fluid term, capacious enough to encompass pieces that today we might more readily identify as short stories. While the pool of sentimental novels is limited, the pool of sentimental fictions, most often to be found in literary magazines, is vast. As Jared Gardner has recently argued,

The audience for shorter and serialized magazine fiction was potentially much larger than for stand-alone novels, with rare exceptions such as best sellers like Charlotte Temple and The Coquette. Davidson estimates that the average number of printings per volume for most novels “ran somewhere between three hundred and fifteen hundred copies” (17). The number of printed copies of an early American novel does not allow us to estimate the actual number of readers, because we do not have a good way to estimate the pass-along rate, and novels were popular fare in subscription and circulating libraries, where even a few copies could dramatically increase readership. But, by contrast, most successful magazines, those lasting more than a single year, had subscription figures ranging from four hundred, on the low end, to fifteen hundred. Magazines, moreover, like newspapers, had much higher pass-along rates than bound novels. Indeed, publishers and editors complained throughout the early and mid-nineteenth century that Americans preferred to borrow serial publications, rather than pay for their own subscriptions.Footnote ⁵ While frustrating to publishers and editors, this sharing of periodicals at least quadrupled the number of readers when compared to subscribers. Novels-in-codex, on the other hand, were more highly prized as material objects (they were included in wills and property valuations through the middle of the nineteenth century) and thus far less likely to be casually shared with neighbors. Given the relatively inexpensive nature of literary magazines, the heterogeneous mixture of material included in these literary museums, and the widespread sharing of periodicals, the audience for sentimental fictions would have been much larger and more diverse than the audience for individual novels, many of which were limited to regional readerships.

Much more work, then, needs to be done on magazine fiction in general. Grappling with magazine fiction entails dealing with two separate challenges, however: resisting the lure of “Americanness” and coming to terms with seriality. While “Americanness” persists as a category of analysis in sentimental fiction, it may be one of those claims that we need to let go of in order to properly contend with magazine fictions. Many short sentimental fictions were published anonymously or pseudonymously and, given the absence of international copyright, were reprinted from British or continental European sources. A broader frame of reference that takes into account the flow of sentimental texts across the Atlantic would be more useful in discussing magazine fictions than a framework based on a singular national identity. “Americanness,” in fact, was always a flexible label: remember that Charlotte Temple was written, originally published, and even partly set in London, though it was never embraced by the British reading public, and thus we claim it for the US. It should come as no surprise that other British sentimental fictions appealed to American audiences. And equally, it is past time for scholars of sentimental literature, and Early Americanists more generally, to pay serious attention to the issue of seriality. Long before Uncle Tom's Cabin was serialized in the National Era, American reading audiences had been socialized to read sentimental fiction in parts. While a few essays and book chapters have discussed early sentimental serials like Amelia, or the Faithless Briton, Judith Sargent Murray's Story of Margaretta (1798), and Susanna Rowson's Sincerity (1803–4), relatively little attention has been paid even in such scholarship to these works as serials. Studying serialization in literary magazines and tracing the reprinting of individual texts throughout the Atlantic region would have been nearly impossible in the 1980s, when Davidson began working on sentimental fiction. The advent of digitized resources such as American Periodicals Series Online and Google Books enables us now to consider how sentimental fictions as a whole shaped transatlantic cultural life in the long eighteenth century, and to continue the recovery project that Davidson initiated in new directions.

CHAPTER 7: THE PICARESQUE AND THE MARGINS OF POLITICAL DISCOURSE

Among the three genre chapters of Revolution and the Word, that addressing the picaresque posed challenges that its counterparts did not. Where the other two genres covered – the sentimental and the gothic – were contemporary trends of great popularity, fascination, imitation, and discussion, the picaresque was much more a genre of the past, remote enough from Anglo-American experience to lack terminological clarity or strong literary roots.Footnote ¹ Where the sentimental and the gothic had prolific and exemplary practitioners – Susanna Rowson and Charles Brockden Brown, respectively – the picaresque seemed the label for the orts. This catchall quality is evident in the vastness and bagginess of Davidson's definitions: the picaresque is a genre of “loose structure and formalistic latitude”; of “preoccupation with marginality, with extremes, with the most contradictory aspects of society”; of “disharmonious ideologies” and “[n]arrative irresolution”; of “provisional” morality; of “global episodism”; of “encyclopedic” instruction; and so on (163, 164, 165, 169, 170, original emphasis). The characterizations accumulate over the course of the chapter, making “picaresque,” at first glance a seemingly narrow genre, the most capacious category in Davidson's study.

Such definitional reach demonstrates the prevailing tendency in readings of Mikhail Bakhtin in the United States in the 1980s. While Bakhtin was far from consistent in his characterization of the picaresque, the essays collected in The Dialogic Imagination, particularly “Discourse in the Novel” (1934–35), largely aim to isolate discursive trends and lineages in European writing, with the picaro signaling a chronotopic combination of the rogue (distinct from the fool or the clown) with the “high road winding through one's native land.”Footnote ² By contrast, the Bakhtin of Rabelais and His World (1965) offered a model of carnivalesque radicalism within which hegemonic categories were upended and language was destabilized. While the classificatory chapters of Revolution and the Word nod to the former, analytical Bakhtin in sketching three novelistic modes, it is the Rabelaisian Bakhtin who rhetorically predominates. Medieval French peasants are merely replaced by Shaysite agitators in their affiliation with the novelistic sensibility; however tenuous the radicalism of the early American novel proves to be, for Davidson it is on the side of revolution. In such a context, “picaresque” is almost synonymous with “insurgent,” even as the limitations, contradictions, and containment of that insurgency are repeatedly explored.

Thinking about Davidson's project thirty years later, then, how might one take up the challenge posed by the “picaresque” rubric? We can start by thinking about the narrative strands that predominate in her discussion. On one hand is the adventure story, characterized by the episodic collation of action sequences and geographic mobility. Davidson's examples stretch from the anonymous Story of Constantius and Pulchera (1789–90) and James Butler's Fortune's Foot-ball (1797) to nonfictional travel narratives like Elkanah Watson's A Tour of Holland (1790). On the other hand is the comic novel, characterized by satire and critique. Here the primary examples include the anonymous Adventures of Jonathan Corncob (1787), Hugh Henry Brackenridge's Modern Chivalry (1792–1815), Royall Tyler's The Algerine Captive (1797), and Tabitha Tenney's Female Quixotism (1801). Obviously some of these examples defy even this streamlined distinction. The conflicted modes of The Algerine Captive – its satirical first half clashing with the more ethnographic captivity narrative of the second half – are a recurrent topic for that novel's critics, and Modern Chivalry's change in tone and event from the farcical volumes of the 1790s to the increasingly earnest, even pedantic, final volumes also speaks to the weakness of generic labels here. The messiness of prominent examples aside, Davidson's picaresque tries to patch together two generic strands with different histories and different contexts. So what might we better say about the early American novel if we prize these two modes apart?

The adventure story has a particularly convoluted background. The common tropes of European adventure narratives – shipwrecks, piracy and highway robbery, kidnappings and disguises, threatening beasts and forests, friends and family lost and reunited, dungeon imprisonment and escape – all circulated widely throughout US fiction. But by contrast, there are other adventure tropes – Indian captivity; the journey into undiscovered lands; encounters with New World flora, fauna, and landscape; revolutionary conflict; the horrors of slavery – that have seemingly more “American” inflections. A great many early US novels seem to be characterized by the tension between these two fields, the clearest example perhaps being Isaac Mitchell's The Asylum (1811). Mitchell's first volume is dominated by the European tale of the (tellingly named) Berghers; but when the novel returns to the western hemisphere, even as European tropes still intrude – a castle in Connecticut, most famously – more familiar “American” tropes also arise, like the Carolina journey (also present in William Hill Brown's The Power of Sympathy (1789) and Judith Sargent Murray's Story of Margaretta (1798), among others) and the encounter with a Founder (also present in The Algerine Captive, Jesse Holman's The Prisoners of Niagara (1810), Samuel Woodworth's Champions of Freedom (1816), etc.).Footnote ³ Yet however distinct this tension between European and American adventure details seems, it is something of an optical illusion. The tropes in question are far from geographically or historically self-evident, and any reader of colonial texts will understand their entanglement. John Smith's famous encounter with an Algonquin king and princess, for instance, and his use of talismanic objects like compasses, guns, and print, are all adaptations of European adventure tales and specifically draw on his previous encounters with the Turks and related writings in the epic mode. It would be more accurate, then, to say – taking Davidson as a guide – that the two adventure clusters express conflicting chronotopes.

A detailed example from The Story of Constantius and Pulchera may illustrate the tension. The scene follows Constantius's daring retrieval of Pulchera from a balcony forty feet above street level:

The paragraph is typical of this novella, as characters move in and out of competing chronotopes – one minute wandering tenderly through a meadow, the next in a realm of empirical measurements (miles, rods) and empressment gangs. One has the sense, by the end of this paragraph, that Constantius has been yanked into a more modern chronotope of naval labor while Pulchera remains in the differently lit declivity of an older mode of distress: it is as if she is watching Constantius from a different book. She soon, of course, moves rapidly on herself, in a potentially satisfying fashion that modern understandings of Constantius and Pulchera as an incoherently assembled hodgepodge may fundamentally ignore. Eighteenth-century readers, in this respect, may not have been able to overlook the jarring passage from subgenre to subgenre but they could have actively engaged with it. Such lurches, after all, constitute Pulchera herself, and her well-known episode of cross-dressing finds amplified expression in genre-crossing. At times the novella can almost seem to be asking which subgenre best accommodates its two lovers, as if figuring out the literary mode in which generic upheavals might come to rest.

The adventure tale, then, is less a matter of New World versus Old World modes than a jumbling of modes from a transatlantic literary history. Here we could fruitfully think about a writer little mentioned by Davidson, John Davis.Footnote ⁵ An émigré from Europe like James Butler (though one who returned there fairly quickly), Davis seems to have used his time in the United States to prolifically stitch together materials of tremendous local popularity. His first major fictional work, 1798's The Original Letters of Ferdinand and Elisabeth, combined travel narrative (above all a walk across New Jersey) with the sensational tale of a murder–suicide in New York, with results that were far from seamless. The Farmer of New Jersey (1800) and The Wanderings of William (1801) also show the challenges of literary synthesis, for while the second work purports to be the sequel to the former – what William was actually doing as his abandoned family fell apart – its racy naval tale stands in stark contrast to its more pastoral predecessor. Davis's most successful assemblage is probably Walter Kennedy: An Interesting American Tale (1805), which follows its title character across the Atlantic, through New Orleans and into the western territories, where he seeks romance with a Native American woman (perhaps hinting at the John Smith–Pocahontas story that Davis would streamline and popularize in multiple versions thereafter). Davis strikes me as important here primarily because he produces a synthesis with few, if any, counterparts among American-born writers – a result, most likely, of the fact that he came from outside the US literary market.Footnote ⁶

Comedic writing poses similar challenges, though its novelistic expressions are much more limited. There is a small cluster of texts from the 1790s that seems indebted to older English comic traditions. Hugh Henry Brackenridge's Modern Chivalry, for example, is clearly inspired by a satirical strain (Swift is the favored reference) that could be called “Augustan,” both for its avowed identification with classical writing and for its appreciation of comic modes (derived most notably from Cervantes, Shakespeare, and Rabelais) already considered Old World. But Chivalry is here, as in many other respects, anomalous. The rarity of this strain in early American fiction is best indexed by references to French comic writers – Voltaire, LeSage, Rabelais, Molière – that are hard to come by except in Brackenridge's work.Footnote ⁷ The other major comic works of the moment – Tyler's The Algerine Captive and Tenney's Female Quixotism – invoke Smollett and Burney, through plot and voice respectively in the former, and through voice and plot respectively in the latter.

It is hard to generalize about such a small corpus, though it is worth noting the absence of any work modeled on Oliver Goldsmith's The Vicar of Wakefield (1766), a profoundly conservative novel constantly cited as a comic favorite by Americans. That so many late eighteenth-century writers mentioned it without attempting an imitation may speak to the attraction of a confident, gentle mode of humor closely tied to hierarchical traditions which had no apparent US counterparts. Instead, a successful imitator would only arrive early in the 1820s, in the shape of Washington Irving (not coincidentally an eventual biographer of Goldsmith), whose wit oscillates between the regional – especially in relation to Dutch New York – and the Continental.Footnote ⁸ Royall Tyler's The Yankey in London (1809), a deeply Anglophilic work that broadly anticipates Irving's Sketch Book (1819–20), may share a similar tone, but if we are speaking of the early American novel the other major cluster of comic writing in this period comes in the form of caustic political satires flailing at the seemingly unbeatable hegemony of the Jeffersonian Democrats: among them The Adventures of Uncle Sam: In Search after His Lost Honor (1816) by “Frederick Augustus Fidfaddy,” The Yankee Traveller (1817) by Thomas Pettengill, and the anonymous Fragments of a History of Bawlfredonia (1819). Most of these works drew inspiration from New England traditions of Federalist satire extending at least as far back as the so-called Connecticut Wits, and most expressed sharp condemnation of a degenerate US political culture. The anomaly within this group seems to be the anonymous Life of Obadiah Benjamin Franklin Bloomfield (1818), a work evoking the comic voice and style of Laurence Sterne, who – almost as much as Goldsmith – is ubiquitous and invisible in the early American novel, often cited but rarely imitated.

Generally speaking, two tentative conclusions can be drawn from this more rigorous anatomization of the “picaresque.” The first is that the comic mode, in contrast to the sentimental, gothic, or adventure genres, seems underdeveloped within early America's novel culture. This weakness is particularly notable in light of the omnipresence of other forms of comic writing in the post-Revolutionary period, from popular verse, almanac mots, and joke books, to private club discourses, satirical editorials and pamphlets, and theatrical sketches. If we use Davidson's chronotopic analysis as a knife instead of a scoop, we can see that a wide range of comic styles were familiar to US readers, from the Boston composer William Billings's allegorical satire The Porcupine Alias the Hedge-Hog: or Fox Turned Preacher (1784) to the New England entrepreneur–editor Thomas Fessenden's mock epic Terrible Tractoration!!: A Poetical Petition Against Galvanizing Trumpery (1803), to name just two of the more baroque examples. Yet there was no corresponding richness or stylistic range in the novelistic tradition, suggesting that the novel was at this point a site of generic constriction, caution, and neutrality, ceding playfulness of voice to shorter or more ephemeral texts in which authors had very different stakes.

And second, it must be noted that even the early American comic novel shows the predominance of political conservatism rather than anything approximating a revolutionary countervoice. Tyler, for instance, after participating in the suppression of the Massachusetts Regulation, was fairly regularly allied with New England Federalism; Tenney, while perhaps distancing herself from the more acerbic traditions of Connecticut satire, also seems to have been firmly in the Federalist camp; and the satirists of the 1810s were explicitly anti-Jeffersonian and anti-plebeian. The oddball was Brackenridge, a Democratic partisan, and he controversially distanced himself from the left flank of his party at several key moments in his career. It may be too crude to characterize the novelistic satire of this period as unequivocally rightist – the slippery ambiguities of the Swiftian Tory tradition are a permanent reminder of the challenge satire poses to political classification – but the anemic comic tradition in the early American novel nonetheless foregrounds the problem of literary conservatism in unavoidable ways. As provocative and suggestive as Davidson's work on the picaresque was, then, its stress on the novel's formal and political radicalism undoubtedly drew attention away from its more narrow and reactive qualities. A valuable starting point for redressing this oversight can be found in Paul Giles's interrogation of the concept of the burlesque in Transatlantic Insurrections: British Culture and the Formation of American Literature, 1730–1860 (2001), but as Davidson herself noted a decade ago the chapter on the picaresque in Revolution and the Word has been the least reprinted and least debated part of the book.Footnote ⁹ The full dimensions, extent, and tactics of a rightist literary culture – whether in the adventure or the comic mode – thus remain to be assessed.

CHAPTER 8: EARLY AMERICAN GOTHIC: THE LIMITS OF INDIVIDUALISM

Revolution and the Word is so deeply implicated in the field of early American literature and culture, and vice versa, that the occasion for this roundtable feels less like the anniversary of a book's publication and more like the anniversary of an entire discipline. Its appearance didn't just signal a turning point in the critical history of early American literary studies; thirty years later, it remains mandatory reading for anyone working in the field. The implicit question posed by this roundtable is how a single book continues to possess such vitality when critical methodologies have shifted so considerably since its publication, but at a glance it is easy to see how Revolution and the Word has endured: few monographs can claim the same jaw-dropping archival scope, sui generis intervention, or enviable scholarly rigor (not to mention its deeply entertaining flashes of deadpan humor). This is nowhere more evident than in Davidson's chapter on the gothic novel. Thus, in what follows, I can offer just a few observations on what Revolution and the Word can tell us about the current state of scholarship on the early American gothic.

Let me begin, then, with the most obvious point: like the rest of the book, the chapter on the gothic is striking for its extensive archival recovery. To be sure, much of the chapter is devoted to a reading of Charles Brockden Brown's now-canonical Arthur Mervyn (1799–1800), but Davidson situates that reading in relation to some less familiar texts: Isaac Mitchell's The Asylum (1811), Sally Wood's Julia, and the Illuminated Baron (1800), the anonymous St. Herbert, a Tale (first serialized in 1796), George Watterston's Glencarn (1810), and Rebecca Rush's Kelroy, a Novel (1812) among them. In 1986, this was an unprecedented move. Prior to the publication of Revolution and the Word, any discussion of the gothic in America tended to restrict itself solely to the question of its adaptation, particularly in relation to Brockden Brown and his allegedly flawed and idiosyncratic genius. Unlike her predecessors, Davidson argued that Brown's central place in the archive could only be understood by attending to the works of his close contemporaries – even those, as she delicately puts it, that “fall far short of aesthetic genius” (218). For Davidson, it was more important that writers of gothic fiction in the early republic were united in their preoccupation with the paradoxes and possibilities of liberal individualism during a period of momentous social upheaval.

Davidson's extensive project of recovery recuperated a slew of gothic novels that previous critics had dismissed as redundant or derivative, so it is somewhat surprising that, three decades on, this archive remains largely obscure. Even now, most of the gothic works she considers (except Brown's) are rarely taught or studied, and few of them exist in modern editions. This is still more perplexing when one considers that, just one year before Davidson's book appeared, the sentimental novel was beginning to enjoy a renaissance at the hands of Jane Tompkins in Sensational Designs (1985). Thanks to Tompkins's work and that of subsequent critics (Julia Sterne and Gillian Brown, for instance), once-derided novels like Charlotte Temple (1794) and The Coquette (1797) took center stage in the canon. Why didn't the same thing happen to the early gothic novels Davidson discussed? To my mind, it has everything to do with the way we have read gothic fiction over the last thirty years.

Revolution and the Word was written at the height of the historical turn, when literary scholars faced two substantial challenges: first, how to redress the ahistoricism of the New Critical mythopoeticism, which tended to sideline social context in favor of ideological neutrality, and second, how to counter post-structuralism's attack on the integrity of language. Symptomatic reading, or the practice of mining literature for evidence of its historical engagements, proved a powerful means of addressing these challenges. It is little wonder, then, that Leslie Fiedler's famous account of the American gothic as a distinctly “guilty” form in Love and Death in the American Novel (1960) possessed such compelling explanatory power for historicist critics. For Fiedler, the gothic sublimates the repressed anxieties of a nation traumatized by its national crimes (slavery, industrialization, revolution, frontier expansion, etc.). Much of the gothic criticism produced after Fiedler tended to reproduce his guilt thesis in some form because it proved so compatible with the historicist premise that the American novel must be about history in order to qualify as a genuine literary article. By way of the pathology of guilt, scholars impressed the gothic into the service of prevailing critical arguments about the nationalist project of the early American novel by reading the gothic in a negative declension – that is, as the disruption or destruction of some continuous narrative about self, history, or nation. This approach did double duty: it recuperated the gothic as a “legitimate” object of study, and it shored up the nationalizing narrative in which the American novel's cultural history is a romance plot that charts the nation's progressive self-making from inauspicious beginnings. For all its advantages, however, this approach had its pitfalls.

Once critics took for granted the idea that novels had to respect national boundaries, reinscribe community in autogenerative terms, and serve as a repository of repressed historical information, the archive shrank to include only those works that substantiated such a claim. To my mind, this explains why Davidson's expansive archive of the early American gothic novel never took off. Few of the novels she discusses confine their plots to American geographies, claim to represent a unified national identity, or are even easily distinguished from their British counterparts. Wood's Julia, and the Illuminated Baron is a case in point. Set in Revolutionary France and gaudily decked out with a full complement of spectral hauntings, secret histories, reanimated corpses, long-lost identities, impregnable castles, and scheming Illuminati, it uses every Radcliffean signature in the book while refusing to conform to a strictly Americanist national framework. Even those novels that do make claims to literary nationalism (The Asylum, say, or Glencarn) follow Wood's lead by reproducing rather than rejecting the narrative tropes of the British costume gothic. No wonder such works remain excluded from the canon, because it is all but impossible to reconcile their formal structures to the kind of nationalist historicism that has long dominated the field.

Hence it is all the more striking that Davidson does pull off this critical feat, by arguing that the gothic registers early Americans’ fears about the irruption of irrational impulses and the disintegration of a liberal individualist civil society. In making this case, to be sure, she employs what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick calls the “paranoid reading style” to encode the gothic as a coy repository of repressed political information, but she nonetheless takes a methodological turn that distinguishes her argument from other contemporary claims about the gothic.Footnote ¹ Specifically, she maintains that the gothic is about an epistemological category in political philosophy – the eighteenth-century model of the autonomous individual – rather than some spectacular object of historical anxiety (slavery, territorial expansion, Native Americans, revolution, etc.). As it turns out, this is an important critical distinction because it invites an important question: is the gothic about national psychosis or a national psychology? They do not amount to the same thing. Indeed, this distinction has proven prophetic; much current scholarship informed by the turn to affect and aesthetics adopts it as a starting point. Let me explain in more detail, then, how we can get from Davidson's argument to current trends shaping the field.

The explanatory model of repression and guilt rests on a tautology: early Americans were fearful of their social, political, or racial Others, so if these Others appear encoded in gothic form, those forms must reflect early Americans’ fears. This tautology has motivated rich and varied inquiries into the discursive structures of identity categories such as race, gender, and sexuality, but as Justine Murison succinctly explains, it occupies a critical blindspot: “The role ‘anxiety’ plays as both discursive source and its result … complicates historicism by resisting causal relationships: ‘Anxiety’ stands metonymically for the motivation behind which analysis cannot go.”Footnote ² Put another way, fear (arguably the gothic's chief aesthetic effect) cannot underwrite the repression schema and provide a means of explaining it. Gothic fiction has a generic obligation to produce and manage terror, so, in principle, it offers the least reliable index of supposedly common anxieties.

Alternatively, if we assume that the gothic presents complex political information in the language of psychology but we also resist the impulse to decode that information in historico-psychoanalytic terms, an altogether different picture of the gothic begins to emerge. Murison, for example, brilliantly recuperates “anxiety” from its role as a symptomatic reading practice to rejuvenate it as the constitutive relation between literature and eighteenth-century physiological theories of psychology. Taking a somewhat different tack, Paul Hurh rightly posits that we need to revisit the affective intensity of the gothic, or what he identifies as “American terror,” to consider how it functions as a fundamental instrument of consciousness and understanding. Drawing on recent work in affect theory, Hurh argues that the peculiar strain of fear we encounter in much of our best-known nineteenth-century gothic works labors to delineate the feeling of reason's authority over our emotional life. In other words, terror does not challenge reason (pace Davidson); rather, it participates in “the invention and formalization of universal method in the Enlightenment's definition of thought.”Footnote ³ For my own part, I take seriously Davidson's claim that the gothic assaults the American fantasy of self-determination by taking aim at the “interpretative propensities and ideological premises of the individual” (253), but as I see it this only tells half the story. I maintain that the American gothic transforms the unique generic relationship between the early British novel and the reproduction of the modern individual to formulate, in literary terms, a complex and wholly distinct theory of the political subject capable of navigating the exigencies of a turbulent Atlantic world.

These are just a few scholarly examples that assume a hermeneutics of ontology which inheres in the language of the gothic, where the study of the mind and its affective responses in the long eighteenth century are inextricably tied to epistemological, scientific, and aesthetic inquiry, moral authority, and the principles of government. This critical reevaluation of the psychological elements of the gothic means that we are ready to revisit Davidson's neglected archive. Indeed, we are in a better position now than ever before to address the complex and seemingly unintuitive generic rules that structure many of the novels written in the early republic. A large body of fiction has all too easily been dismissed as preposterously far-fetched, poorly plotted, or not sufficiently indigenous in its preoccupations. The resurgent interest in aesthetics and affect can help us redress this critical oversight. In Novel Nostalgias, for instance, John Funchion adapts Rancière's notion of the aesthetic regime of art to critique the rules that govern the qualities of “literariness” and how those rules may be disrupted. For Funchion, the aesthetic regime of art is “useful when elastically applied to art that defies ethical norms and mimetic or generic expectations in novels and other literary forms that predate modernism.”Footnote ⁴ Although Funchion brings this particular notion to bear on the nineteenth-century discourse of nostalgia, I see several helpful points of intersection with the early American gothic and the early American novel more generally. Like the nostalgic works that Funchion considers, many early American novels remain largely estranged from the canon for their defiance of generic expectation. But if we take at face value the idea that the early American novel is a heterogeneous form that thrives on a multitude of transatlantic generic registers, then we are better able to assess the politics of its networked form. On this basis, it seems plausible that the early American novel's agency lies in its ability to formally disrupt genre and thereby transform our perception of the eighteenth-century anglophone world.

RETROSPECTION AND THE WORD

It is a great honor that the Journal of American Studies has devoted its pages to a forum on a book I published thirty years ago.Footnote ¹ Since I began researching and writing Revolution and the Word in my first semester of graduate school, when I was twenty-one years old, I have lived with some version of this book for quite literally my entire adult life. As any book historian knows, a book changes according to the context within which it is written, produced, read, and shared. And so Revolution and the Word has changed, for me, many times. In this afterword, I want to look at just three of those moments in its long life: the original context of its writing, the unfortunate happenstance of its missing sequel, and its post-Internet rejuvenation.

When I wrote a paper about William Hill Brown's The Power of Sympathy (1789) during my first semester at the State University of New York at Binghamton, I was sure it would turn into my graduate dissertation. My superb advisers, William Bysshe Stein and Bernard Rosenthal, applauded the paper and my ambitions, but cautioned that no one in literature or in history or even in American studies would recognize the subject matter, the method, or the concepts I was using. Literature professors were not interested in actual readers and certainly not in printers and booksellers. Historians were not interested in literature. And no one really believed the American novel existed before James Fenimore Cooper or, possibly, Charles Brockden Brown. “Early American Literature” as a field meant the Puritans. “The early republic” meant the Founding Fathers. “Theory” was French. “Novels” were English. “Historicism” was New Historicism. It did not seem as if there would be much space for a “history-of-texts” approach focussed upon the alternative public sphere of nonelite book printers and publishers, and writers and readers (many of them working-class and/or women), who cocreated a ragtag collection of cheap books that appeared under the rubric “novel” and, sometimes, “American” too.

Given the trajectories of early Americanist scholarship over the last thirty years, it is hard to believe that Revolution and the Word was considered sui generis when it first appeared for combining literary theory, cultural studies, and material culture with feminist theory, race theory, and some nascent (and, at the time, under-theorized) postcolonial theory. The idea that a body of American novels existed before 1800 was astonishing in itself. And yet the book was exceptionally well received and, even before its publication, there were serious, eminent scholars who were interested in what I was doing. They made a big difference. Several American feminist historians and literary scholars were supportive of my work from the beginning, including Nancy Cott, Linda Kerber, Annette Kolodny, and Wendy Martin, to name but a few. And some of the British Marxist critics were especially kind, including Raymond Williams.Footnote ²

When I wrote Revolution and the Word, most of the early American novels I was writing about were not available in modern editions. Many had not been published since the late eighteenth century and there were a significant number that were either not in any card catalogues or were mis-catalogued – not as a result of the sloppiness of archivists, but because early American printing was an ad hoc business and sometimes the same title page accompanied significantly altered or entirely different texts. During the decade I spent traveling to major research libraries and obscure local historical societies searching for the actual readers and writers of early American novels, I made of habit of letting professional bibliographers know of anything I found that seemed as if it might be of interest to them. I figured that, if I passed on the information to them, they could use the rigorous methods of their discipline to correct misinformation, emend entries, and otherwise enlarge the “canon of early American fiction.”

The last phrase is surrounded by quotation marks because, at the time, the idea of a “canon” for something so obscure as the American novel before 1820 was an oxymoron. But I like the oxymoronic. I seem to prefer it. Looking back, I realize that I have spent much of my career reconsidering the oxus and the mōros – the pointedly foolish – and wondering if, with a different historical and cultural optic, that which has officially been deemed foolish and impossible might not actually be vibrantly and even radically significant. Certainly that which is deemed worthless by those in power can actually be a means of speaking back to power and of opposition to the status quo, as I argued of the early American novel in Revolution and the Word.

Yet there is an anomaly in the book that none of the early reviewers, to my knowledge, ever remarked upon, but which – to me – seems like a glaring and improbable omission. I speak of a “missing chapter” on Susanna Rowson's Charlotte Temple (1794). How could an exhaustive study of the production and consumption of the early American novel not have a section on the first American best seller?

Well, originally it did.

Right up until the time it went to a professional copyeditor, the manuscript included a long chapter on Rowson's novel, focussing on how different communities of readers – women of all classes, working-class men, former slaves, abolitionists, and immigrants – used this one book to formulate a public sphere different to the one identified in the Constitution of the United States. I only read Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1983) while I was going through the final readers’ reports and copyedits and was astonished at the parallels between his account of postcolonial Indonesia and what I was arguing for the post-Revolutionary United States of America.Footnote ³ But once I had read Anderson, it was clear that the Charlotte Temple chapter – which examined the way a dozen or more different editions of the book came to be pirated, used, read, and shared – would be the perfect place to really tease out these new postcolonial ideas about print culture and national identity. Since I was already nervous about the length of the book, I consulted with my editor at Oxford University Press, Bill Sisler, and we decided to remove the Charlotte Temple chapter. Instead, I contracted with OUP to expand this extracted chapter into a full-length sequel, taking this popular book's print history all the way into the twentieth century. We also decided to undertake a series, Early American Women Writers, that would bring back into print a number of early American texts. Two of these were published simultaneously with Revolution and the Word, one of Charlotte Temple and one of Hannah Webster Foster's The Coquette (1797), and I published the excerpted Temple chapter as a small monographic chapbook.Footnote ⁴

To make a very long story short, the sequel never came about. I moved to Japan shortly after the appearance of Revolution and the Word, and when I returned from a remarkable year teaching there, I discovered that there had been a fire in the storage unit in which all of my file cabinets, with over a decade of my research in them, had been stored. This was, of course, before the Internet: all of my data, including that which would be plumbed for the expanded Charlotte Temple chapter, was on handwritten index cards or notepads. There were also hundreds, maybe thousands, of xeroxed pages of various editions of the novel – a Ukranian edition originally published in Manitoba, a Portuguese Charlotte Temple published in Brazil, an abolitionist version used to teach slaves basic literacy skills on the Underground Railroad. And, in all of these, marginalia, inscriptions, dedications, and salutations, made from one reader to another – the evidence of a scrappy book transformed in its reading and in its giving into something else and something more.

I had collected pretty indiscriminately over the years, with no real idea of how it would all be put to use until quite near the end of the project. After the fire, and after I had reconciled myself to the bizarre circumstance of returning to the US and discovering that such a significant part of my life was suddenly gone, I tried to redo the Charlotte Temple research. I spent maybe two or three years thinking I could re-create it all, but then realized that the Introduction to the OUP edition and the pamphlet version of the extracted chapter would have to be my last word on the subject. There was a day in the Newberry Library, one of my favorite places, where I had done so much of my research over the years. I had out an account book of someone who had printed Charlotte Temple. For nearly an hour or so I sat staring down at the smudgy, barely legible eighteenth-century handwriting. A phrase kept repeating in my head, over and over. It was Bartleby's: “I prefer not to.” It was time for me to move on.

I am proud of the research I did on Charlotte Temple – and its reward was the excitement of finding something new, of putting together a giant puzzle tiny piece by tiny piece. But once that element of surprise was gone, I simply did not have the willpower to return to all those historical societies and libraries and bookstalls and try to reconstruct that history of one best seller all over again. Back when I had written that first paper on The Power of Sympathy at SUNY, I had known that the research for an ambitious book on the early American novel would take at least a decade. Then, I had exactly two years of funding. It was the worst economic crisis for higher education until the present time and both my national fellowship from the Woodrow Wilson Foundation and my state scholarship vanished seemingly overnight. So I switched fields and wrote my graduate dissertation on the late nineteenth-century author Ambrose Bierce, whose short stories all fit neatly into one volume. Only after I turned in my Bierce dissertation did one of my advisers suggest I might want to revise one of my early American fiction papers for publication, and so that original seminar paper on The Power of Sympathy appeared in the journal Early American Literature in 1975, and I returned to the post-Revolutionary period. Thus Revolution and the Word was deferred at its beginning and then unexpectedly truncated at its end. Maybe that is exactly as it should be. There is no one right or wrong way to write a book or its sequel. That is the most important message I try to pass on to my doctoral students. You write the way you can, the way you have to, the way that works the best and that makes the most meaning for you and for your field.

Now, of course, the presence of the Internet makes the process of starting or finishing one's research much quicker and much easier. When Revolution and the Word was reprinted by Oxford University Press in 2004, a friend who was also having a book reprinted said we should have a sticker on the front declaring, “Extra Credit: Researched before the Internet.” He was right. When I think of all the ways I do research now, versus all the ways I did back then, it is astonishing to me that I ever could have written Revolution and the Word at all. I know people who wax nostalgic for such things as microfilm readers, but I am not one of them. It is not that the world of Internet knowledge is better or worse than the world of archival knowledge. It is that the worlds are different and not always contiguous, or even compatible, and now we switch back and forth between them in the same way that, once trains were invented, we could suddenly move more readily and casually from town to town.

I often point out to my students how they live with a form of what W. E. B. Du Bois famously called “double consciousness.” Theirs is not to do with race, but to do with epistemology and the limits of the hierarchical knowledge mastered in formal education. Most of my classes now use this epistemological tension as a starting point to explore, in terms Foucault and Fanon have theorized, alternative knowledge production, the coloniality of historical perspective, and the role that formal education plays in contributing to (rather than helping to erase) structural inequality. I have my students spend more time thinking about what does or does not constitute a good question than coming up with right answers. And I also want them to understand their own role as authorities. I long ago stopped assigning research papers that only I, as the professor, would read. Everything in my courses now is a contribution to public knowledge, whether that is a simple blog post, an online publication, or something more substantive such as helping a local historical society rewrite its materials in a more inclusive fashion. The Internet, in short, has changed the community we imagine and the way we imagine community.

Thus Revolution and the Word would have been a far different book had I written it now, not least because of the vast archives of transatlantic exchange, influence, and theft that have been made newly visible (and newly searchable) in the last decade. Thanks to the kinds of research material now abundantly available, I cannot help but confront enormous scholarly questions that alter the basic paradigms which shaped Revolution and the Word. Yet Revolution and the Word, and my subsequent work with librarians, have also helped to shape what has been digitized, what has been restored, remembered, revisited, revitalized, reactivated, reframed, and revolutionized – word by word. Moreover, Revolution and the Word can also be used to shape the debate when pundits begin making a lot of foolish claims about how the Internet is making youth stupid, distracted, lonely, misanthropic, susceptible to sexual predators, or unfit for productive future labor. All these were, of course, the accusations that the Founding Fathers and other elites of the post-Revolutionary period leveled against the novel. Revolution and the Word asked how the new technologies of mass printing, machine-made paper, and machine-made ink rendered possible forms of popular print culture accessible to new audiences. The kinds of question asked of early American novels by a “history-of-texts” approach can be asked again of the new interactive forms of culture produced and consumed in our digital era. We have to be skeptical about critique of these forms. What is simply normativity, authority, elitism, and hegemony? How do we sort out cultural hysteria from genuine concern? What is the function of one generation's moral panic in the face of another, younger generation's identity-forming community?

First and last and always, I return to a post-Gramscian analysis and the critical acuity of the great Stuart Hall. In post-independence America, it was unsettling to the elites that women and the working classes flocked to the novel at the same time that the new US Constitution, the guarantee of a supposedly revolutionary culture, excluded women, the unpropertied, and slaves from citizenship. Now, as we have eviscerated social services and made higher education unaffordable, as we have saddled young people with political systems that are unworkable, social problems that are seemingly unsolvable, and environmental disasters that are catastrophic, is it really so surprising that we label them “coddled” and scapegoat their entertainments as dumb, distracting, and even dangerous? If culture is a critical site for social action, a place for the contestation and unsettling of power, perhaps in hashtag activism such as #BlackLivesMatter or #SayHerName one can begin to see some possibilities for policing the crisis, talking back to the official versions of state power evidenced in presidential campaigns, political punditry, and the mainstream media. That, always, is the hope. Even thirty years after Revolution and the Word, and more than two hundred years after the period it describes, I still hold to that post-Gramscian/Hallian faith in the potential of culture: that, as cultural consumers and producers, in the late eighteenth century or in the present, we are able to find those forms of agency that allow us not just individual expression but community, and the possibility of working together for a greater social voice, for equality, and for change.