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The Myth of the Republic and the Theory of American Literature

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2009

William L. Hedges
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American Literary history conventionally interprets the sixty or seventy years between the Stamp Act crisis and the beginning of the “American Renaissance” by highlighting the theme of the “quest for nationality” or the effort to achieve “literary independence.” Accounts of what are considered the formative years of a native literary tradition trace the gradual development of a climate of opinion more conducive to American authorship and belles lettres than the one that prevailed in the colonial period. Revolutionary nationalism was obviously a major factor in the shift of attitude. Beginning even before the war, at Princeton, Yale, and a few other redoubts of civilization, and gathering momentum on a broad front after 1776, a campaign for an instant, if not indeed an indigenous, high culture gradually produced a shrill literary nationalism. The persistent clamor for the Americanization of poems, plays, and novels helped beat back the long-standing puritanical fear of the imagination as an ambush of the devil. It also made headway in combating the closely related American prejudice against activity that seemed to serve no immediate practical purpose. Gradually a legion of enthusiastic amateur and semiprofessional authors ventured into belles lettres, beyond the more utilitarian literary forms—history, biography, autobiography, sermon, promotional tract, almanac, and captivity narrative—which, together with religious verse, had predominated in the colonial period. However crudely constructed or awkwardly styled, American epic poems were written, as were long pastorals. By 1800 Americans had produced an abundance of satire in both verse and prose. With William Cullen Bryant's early work added to Francis Hopkinson's and Philip Freneau's, American lyric poetry achieved some respectability by 1820, the year of the completion of Washington Irving's Sketch-Book, with its two remarkable short stories, “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” American theaters were producing native comedies and tragedies. Successful magazines were in operation. And the reading of novels had become a craze, which American writers were helping to nourish.

Type
Research Article
Information
Prospects , Volume 4 , October 1979 , pp. 101 - 120
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1979

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References

NOTES

1. Although the importance of this theme had been generally recognized well before the appearance of Spencer, Benjamin's The Quest for Nationality: An American Literary Campaign (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse Univ. Press, 1957)Google Scholar and Spiller, Robert's anthology The American Literary Revolution, 1783–1837 (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1967)Google Scholar, these books provide much of the detailed demonstration of its applicability to the early national period.

2. In his introductory chapter to The Literary History of the American Reuolution, 1763–1783 (New York, 1898), I, pp. 28–29Google Scholar, Tyler says that he reads Revolutionary writings “not so much for their independent artistic value as for their humanistic and historic value,” as a source of “intimate knowledge of the American people.”

3. This view actually began to take form in the writings of early advocates of literary nationalism even before the advent of Emerson on the American literary scene (see “The Challenge of Nationalism, 1815–1820,” in Spiller, , ed., American Literary Revolution).Google Scholar

4. See, for instance, Becker, Carl L., The Declaration of Independence: A Study in the History of Political Ideas (New York: Knopf, 1923), Chap. 5Google Scholar; Davidson, Philip, Propaganda and the American Revolution, 1763–1783 (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1941)Google Scholar; Edmund, S. and Morgan, Helen M., The Stamp Act Crisis (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1953)Google Scholar, passim; Schlesinger, Arthur M., Prelude to Independence: The Newspaper War on Britain, 1764–1776 (New York: Knopf, 1957)Google Scholar; Bailyn, Bernard. ed., Pamphlets of the American Revolution, 1750–1776 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1965)Google Scholar, I, Introduction, Chaps. 1, 2, and introductions to individual pamphlets; Wood, Gordon, The Creation of the American Republic (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1969)Google Scholar, passim; Kerber, Linda K., Federalists in Dissent: Imagery and Ideology in Jeffersonian America (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1970)Google Scholar; May, Henry F., The Enlightenment in America (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1976), passim.Google Scholar

5. See Miller, Perry, “From Edwards to Emerson,” in Errand into the Wilderness (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1956)Google Scholar; Feidelson, Charles, Symbolism and American Literature (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1953)Google Scholar, especially Chap. 3; Bercovitch, Sacvan, The Puritan Origins of the American Self (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1975).Google Scholar

6. See especially Simpson, 's “The Symbolism of Literary Alienation in the Revolutionary Age,” Journal of Politics, 38 (02 1977), 79–100CrossRefGoogle Scholar; “The Printer as a Man of Letters: Franklin and the Symbolism of the Third Realm,” in The Oldest Revolutionary: Essays on Benjamin Franklin, ed., Lemay, J. A. Leo (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1976), pp. 3–20Google Scholar; “The Satiric Mode: The Early National Wits,” in The Comic Imagination in American Literature., ed., Rubin, Louis D. (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1973), pp. 49–61.Google Scholar Other significant recent works are Leary, Lewis, Soundings: Some Early American Writers (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1975)Google Scholar; Shaw, Peter, The Character of John Adams (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1976)Google Scholar; Emerson, Everett, ed., American Literature, 1764–1789: The Revolutionary Years (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1977)Google Scholar, especially the essays by Evelyn J. Hinz, Calhoun Winton, Thomas Philbrick, Robert D. Arner, and Cecelia Tichi on Paine, colonial theater, Jefferson, the Connecticut wits, and Adams and Benjamin Rush. At the international conference on “American Literature of the Revolutionary War Era” held at Williamsburg, Virginia, December 8–10, 1976, papers on a wide variety of topics suggested the fruitfulness of considering an expanded definition of literary activity and an expanded canon of literary works in the period—see Early American Literature, 11 (Fall 1976)Google Scholar, an issue devoted to some of the Williamsburg papers.

7. On Matthiessen and his American Renaissance see Ruland, Richard, The Rediscovery of American Literature: Premises of Critical Taste, 1900–1940 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1967)Google Scholar, Chap. 6; White, George Abbott, “Ideology and Literature: American Renaissance and F. O. Matthiessen,” in Literature in Revolution, eds., White, G. A. and Newman, C. (New York: Holt, Rinehart, Winston, 1972), pp. 430–500.Google Scholar Giles Gunn's statement about American Renaissance is particularly pertinent: “Matthiessen makes clear from the beginning that the organic theory of expression [of Emerson and the other Renaissance writers] reflected the chief concerns of an age that was highly ambiguous. For the transcendental era … was at once an era of boundless optimism and deep-seated anxiety, and the anxiety was the negative side of the optimism. It was an age everywhere characterized by an overwhelming impulse to achieve unity of being.… Yet this preoccupation with unity was the natural reaction to a pervasive fear that existence was coming apart at the seams,” F. O. Matthiessen: The Critical Achievement (Seattle: Univ. of Washington Press, 1975), p. 83.Google Scholar

8. The outlines of the developmental approach were already taking shape in some of the essays in Foerster, Norman et al. 's seminal A Reinterpretation of American Literature (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1928).Google Scholar See also Jones, Howard M., The Theory of American Literature (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1948), pp. 167–70.Google Scholar

9. There is an abundance of literature on Progressive historiography, including Hofstadter, Richard's The Progressive Historians: Turner, Beard, Parrington (New York: Knopf, 1968).Google Scholar A good introduction to the relation of the approach of the Progressives to other approaches in American historiography is Grob, Gerald N. and Billias, George A., eds., Interpretations of American History: Patterns and Perspectives, 2d ed., 2 vols. (New York: Free Press, 1972).Google Scholar

10. Lawrence, D. H., Studies in Classic American Literature (New York: Selzer, 1923)Google Scholar; Williams, William Carlos, In the American Grain (New York: Boni, 1925)Google Scholar; Rahv, Philip, “Paleface and Redskin,” in Image and Idea (Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions, 1948), pp. 1–5Google Scholar; Chase, Richard, The American Novel and Its Tradition (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1957), pp. 1–12Google Scholar; Bewley, Marius, The Eccentric Design: Form in the Classic American Novel (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1959), p. 18Google Scholar; Lewis, R. W. B., The American Adam: Innocence, Tragedy and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1955)Google Scholar; Fiedler, Leslie, Love and Death in the American Novel (New York: Criterion Books, 1960)Google Scholar; Levin, Harry, The Power of Blackness (New York: Knopf, 1958).Google Scholar

11. Kartiganer, Donald M. and Griffith, Malcolm A. in their anthology American Literary Theories (New York: Macmillan, 1972)Google Scholar see the quest for nationality as of enduring importance to writers individually, but they largely ignore the theory that the quest was at some point collectively fulfilled; they concentrate on theories stressing contradictions—see esp. the introduction and Parti.

12. See Wiebe, Robert, The Segmented Society: An Introduction to the Meaning of America (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1975)Google Scholar; Berthoff, Rowland T., An Unsettled People (New York: Harper & Row, 1971)Google Scholar; Kammen, Michael G., People of Paradox: An Inquiry Concerning the Origins of American Civilization (New York: Knopf, 1973)Google Scholar, especially Part 3, Chaps. 7, 9; Jones, Howard M., O Strange New World (New York: Viking, 1964), p. 275Google Scholar; Greene, Jack P., ed., The Ambiguity of the American Revolution (New York: Harper & Row, 1968)Google Scholar; Henretta, James, The Evolution of American Society, 1700–1815 (Lexington, Mass.: Heath, 1973)Google Scholar; Wood, , Creation of the American Republic.Google Scholar

13. As Wood says, “Republicanism meant morefor Americans than simply the elimination of a king and the institution of an elective system. It added a moral dimension, a Utopian depth, to the political separation from England” (Creation of the American Republic, p. 47).Google Scholar He also maintains that the republican “vision” was “so divorced from the realities of American society” as “to make the Revolution one of the great Utopian movements of American history” (p. 54).Google Scholar

14. See Craven, Wesley F., The Legend of the Founding Fathers (New York: New York Univ. Press, 1956)Google Scholar, Chap. 1; Bailyn, , ed., PamphletsGoogle Scholar, Chap. 2; Wood, , Creation of the American Republic, Chap. 1.Google Scholar

15. Silverman, Kenneth, A Cultural History of the American Revolution (New York: Crowell, 1976), pp. 82–87 and passim.Google Scholar

16. See Bailyn, , ed., Pamphlets, pp. 23–27Google Scholar; Benton, William A., Whig-Loyalism: An Aspect of Political Ideology in the American Revolutionary Era (Rutherford, N. J.: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ. Press, 1969).Google Scholar

17. The ambivalences that I have noted elsewhere in Irving and Charles Brockden Brown can in many cases be related to, or redefined in terms of, those prompted by the myth of the republic—see Hedges, W. L., Washington Irving: An American Study, 1802–1832 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1965)Google Scholar and “Charles Brockden Brown and the Culture of Contradictions,” Early American Literature, 9 (Fall 1974), 108–42.Google Scholar

18. Poirier, Richard, A World Elsewhere: The Place of Style in American Literature (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1968)Google Scholar, especially Chap. 1; de Tocqueville, Alexis, Democracy in America (New York: Knopf, 1946), II, p. 59.Google Scholar

19. Thomas Carlyle, quoted by Van Doren, Mark, ed., Travels of William Bartram (n.p., 1928), p. 5.Google Scholar

20. From “America Independent,” The Poems of Philip Freneau, ed., Pattee, F. L. (Princeton, N.J.: University Library, 1902–1907), I, p. 273.Google Scholar

21. From “American Liberty,” ibid., I, p. 149.

22. “America Independent,” I, pp. 271–72.Google Scholar

23. See, for instance, the ending of “America Independent,” I, 281–82.Google Scholar

24. Poems of Freneau, II, pp. 225–29.Google Scholar

25. “The United States have at no time contained a more civilized ‘world’ than that comprised by the men to whom Adams and Jefferson wrote” (Pound, Ezra, “The Jefferson-Adams Letters as a Shrine and a Monument” [originally 1937], in Impact: Essays on the Decline of American Civilization [Chicago: Regnery, 1960], pp. 167–68).Google Scholar Pound also maintains that “American Civilization” lasted only from 1760 to 1830 and then began to deteriorate. It is ridiculous, he argues, to pretend to teach “American literature” and omit “the most significant documents, … assuming that the life of a nation's letters is restricted mostly to second-rate fiction” (pp. 166–68).Google Scholar

26. Beard, James. “Cooper and the Revolutionary Mythos,” Early American Literature. 11 (Spring 1976), 84.Google Scholar

27. Wiebe, , The Segmented Society, p. 46.Google Scholar