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Narratives of Reversal: Fiction of the Young Republic and the Crisis of Liberation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2009

James E. Block
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Extract

The intellectual legacy of the American Revolution has cast a long shadow over the study of American fiction. Its enduring narrative of a “nation conceived in liberty” as an “asylum for freedom,” reinforced most recently in Eric Foner's book The Story of American Freedom, perpetuates the conviction of an American commitment to liberation. The early secular models of individualism, Robinson Crusoe, Franklin's Autobiography, and Crévecoeur, promised an uncomplicated release from Old World constraints to the opportunities of a mobile and open society. This expectation of a new and higher individualism, either in democratic society or as often in a space of Edenic openness, until recently shaped our understanding of the culture of the early republic and its literature. As F. O. Matthiessen wrote in his classic work on the writers of the American Renaissance, “They felt that it was incumbent upon their generation to give fulfillment to the potentialities freed by the Revolution, to provide a culture commensurate with America's political opportunities.” Beginning in the 1980s, critics challenging the depth of revolutionary ideology have questioned its influence on the writings of the period. With roots in feminism, reader response theory, postcolonialism, and popular culture, these writers have emphasized in Jane Tompkins's term the “cultural ‘work’” this fiction was “designed to do” in shaping the nascent society.

Type
Research Article
Information
Prospects , Volume 25 , October 2000 , pp. 1 - 33
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2000

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References

NOTES

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182. Ibid., 2: 109, 275, 308, 307, 275.

183. Ibid., 312, 307.

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186. Ibid., 9, 3, 4.

187. Ibid., 9, 10.

188. Ibid., 10, 11.

189. Ibid., 11, 311 (emphasis added).

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