Chapter 9 - The American Revolution

Summary

Despite the dependence of the American colonies on London for their supply of books and their literary style in the eighteenth century, literature functioned as a crucial catalyst of revolutionary fervor and national identity in the 1770s. This mobilisation of radical republican sentiment occurred both in the realm of non-fiction prose (most famously through Thomas Paine’s pamphlet Common Sense) and in poetry, from irreverent ‘carrier addresses’ published in local newspapers to high-toned ‘satires of the times’. The career of African American poet Phillis Wheatley offers a poignant example of the way British literary prestige and pro-revolutionary political expression were at cross-purposes during the revolutionary period. Writers like Wheatley unsettle the dominant cultural nationalist paradigm of American literary history, which sees political independence paving the way for American literary and cultural independence by the mid-nineteenth century, and instead point towards alternative conceptions of freedom in the imperial Atlantic world.