32201

SoSe 18: Writing the Early Republic: Nation-Building, Print Culture, and the Novel

James Dorson

Kommentar

This class explores the relationship between the early American novel and the formation of the US nation-state. The widespread dissemination of print culture in the eighteenth century was inseparable from the emergence of the modern nation-state. As a hybrid “unofficial” form that combines various genres and has no formal links to state power, the advent of the novel as a popular form in the early Republic played an important role both in the formation of national identity as well as its ongoing critical interrogation. Through readings of three of the first American novels from the 1790s, we will examine how popular genres such as the picaresque, the seduction novel, and the gothic romance participated in the imagination of a distinctly American culture after the revolutionary war, but also how the specificity of the novel form at the same time unsettles a sense national coherence by bringing to light cultural anxieties, ideological fractures, and the often violent struggles that go hand-in-hand with the creation of a national state and cultural identity. Alongside formative texts in the constitution of the US nation-state (Thomas Paine’s Common Sense and “The Declaration of Independence”) as well as secondary literature on print culture in the early Republic, we will read the following three novels: Susanna Rowson’s Charlotte Temple (1791), Royall Tyler’s The Algerian Captive (1797), and Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland (1798). Schließen