The first book-length investigation of literature written by loyalists during the Revolutionary period, Philip Gould's nuanced and consequential Writing the Rebellion situates its subject in a series of repeated conflicts – over literary style, wit, natural expression, authentic and false sublimity, and copyright – pervading the eighteenth-century North Atlantic rim. Addressing influential literary historians such as Jay Fleigelman, Christopher Looby, and Edward Cahill (who also assert the centrality of aesthetic thought in the formation of North American revolutionary consciousness), Gould also follows a series of transatlantic studies that unsettle nationally bound accounts of Britain and America in revealing both as part of a larger, more complex field of transatlantic cultural belonging. But while other transatlantic studies of early America reflect upon varying states of being “both” American and British (and especially English), Gould's explores loyalty as the condition of being neither.

Most of Writing the Rebellion surveys the publications through which loyalists and patriots sparred, from the 1765 crisis over the Stamp Act to the convening of the Continental Congress in 1774. Chapter 1 focusses on Rhode Island, where a Tory critique of bombast informed loyalist writers like Martin Howard, who argued that patriotic writers were liable to extravagant historical analogy and inflated, canting expression. That sort of manufactured sublimity ought to call into question the very political judgment of the authors, Howard argued. And yet, as the political tide turned Whiggish in Rhode Island, loyalists themselves became rhetorically excessive, drawing the ridicule of patriotic writers such as James Otis, who despised loyalists not only as cultural traitors, but as insufficiently versed in English aesthetic theory and political thought.

Visiting many other theaters of conflict, Gould recognizes struggles between patriots and loyalists as cisatlantic conflicts over transatlantic affiliation. In chapter 2, he argues that a loyalist critique of the Continental Congress focussed on its discourse to suggest that the Congress lacked legitimacy, whatever other reasons one might cite, for the very hollowness of its rhetoric. Indeed that consideration shaped the debate between Alexander Hamilton and Samuel Seabury, a loyalist pamphleteer who lambasted the Congress not only over policy but also over linguistic pretention and bad usage. Chapter 3 takes up appropriations of the ancient ballad – widely admired across the century as a fountainhead of British literary culture and a model of natural, unadorned rhetorical simplicity – by the spy Major John Andre (whose burlesque The Cow-Chace ridiculed patriotic provincialism) as well as the loyalist authors of The Association, a musical and literary concoction similarly devised to alienate patriots from Britishness.

Thomas Paine dominates Gould's final chapters, which suggest that Common Sense marks the moment when transatlantic standards of literary style become the property of patriots rather than loyalists (as when Paine prevails over his critic “Cato” as incapable of “original invention” and otherwise unable to produce trustworthy or useful political commentary) (130). For Gould, who finds Foucault's “What Is an Author?” useful for understanding the paradoxical effects of anonymity in Revolutionary-era publication, Paine incarnates a new conception of authorship emerging out of the welter of economic and legal interests that pressured the development of copyright in Britain over the course of the century, and that more specifically configured relations between printers, writers, and readers during the 1770s in North America.

In his final chapter, Gould places loyalist critique of Common Sense in the context of the notion – emergent in the mid-1770s – that the Revolution would be an outgrowth of a New England personality, allegedly descended from Cromwellian Puritans and hence prone to revolt. (So in some sense Gould's loyalists come full circle, having formerly regarded a predilection for reaching historical analogy as a key feature of patriotic demagoguery.) For Gould, that context not only clarifies the force of much loyalist critique of Paine, but also helps us to reconsider “regionalism” within a transnational scope (wherein, in this case, New England patriots are now seen as transplants from the English Civil War). Gould is persuasive on this point, and indeed a similar mythos of Cromwellian New Englanders would also structure, much later on, southern apprehensions of New England abolitionists.

Drawing loyalist writing into association with a series of British aesthetes – including Jonathan Swift, Hugh Blair, Samuel Johnson, and Joseph Addison, but frankly no brief list can offer a sense of Gould's range of reference – Gould delves into a canon largely disavowed from a history written by the winners. And yet during the Revolution only one-third of Americans supported independence; far from some marginal phenomenon, loyalty describes a fundamental facet of being American during the Revolutionary period. But even beyond that, Writing the Rebellion displaces an old cliché about American Tories, according to which loyalists were people who could not negotiate that curve in political subjectivity by means of which others stopped being British and started being American. Gould's book lays bare that dichotomy, teaching us that both loyalists and patriots transacted their hostilities by deferring to British cultural – if not political – authority.