Revolutionary republic of letters: Anglo-American radical literature in the 1790s

Aesthetics emerged as a corollary of radical politics in the age of revolution, as various writers---ranging from William Godwin to Hugh Henry Brackenridge---depicted a "world elsewhere" as ideal-type and implicit rebuke to those actually existing Anglo-American public spheres that did not live up to their own claims. This point is central to my project, entitled Revolutionary Republic of Letters: Anglo-American Radical Literature in the 1790s, as I both broaden the standard account of the English Jacobin novel and challenge the paradigm that so often accompanies this literary-historical narrative. Anglo-American Jacobinism was a transatlantic movement that encompassed the intellectual and literary output of the new American republic. In this way, my dissertation undermines the narrowly literary emphasis of 1790s scholarship, even as it expands the parameters of literature to encompass the frankly political writings of those radical Anglo-Irish emigres to the Federalist-era United States who have---of late---occupied such a prominent place in early national historiography. And it is finally in this ostensibly political and didactic literature that we can find the first articulations of both an imaginative faculty and aesthetic state usually ascribed to various romantic successors and associated with political quietism, if not reaction.;Prime Minister William Pitt's counter-revolutionary policies precipitated a radical Anglo-Irish diaspora that brought many would-be radicals to the United States during the 1790s; many of these British and Irish "Jacobins" later became, in the words of one historian, "leading figures in the Jeffersonian movement." These figures include William Duane, John Binns, and Joseph Gales, all of whom impacted---to a greater or lesser extent---early American political institutions and discourse, even as they were effectively transformed through their experiences with actually existing republicanism. Edward Said's model of "traveling theory" is pertinent in this regard, whereby the transplantation of an idea or set of ideas "necessarily involves processes of representation and institutionalization different from those at the point of origin." The emigres confronted a situation more difficult and multifaceted than they had anticipated, encountering repression, especially under the Alien and Sedition Acts in a reactionary Federalist America, before achieving certain political goals under the auspices of Jeffersonian republicanism. In other words, "traveling theory" in this case involved actual travel and necessary adaptation to a new social reality along with the consequent modification of theoretical and ideological assumptions on the part of these individuals. My dissertation juxtaposes this very literal circulation of ideological currents with the more perfectly "public sphere" traffic in ideas that might be traced between William Godwin and Charles Brockden Brown, even as it links these phenomena---and the competing counter-publics they represent---in a number of new and counterintuitive ways; for instance, I read political ephemera, such as James Reynolds's serialized utopian tracts, alongside the properly literary, if broadly political, novels of William Godwin, Charles Brockden Brown, and Hugh Henry Brackenridge.;This juxtaposition points to a broader theoretical point and leading principle of my project---namely interdisciplinarity in the service of a more complete literary-critical and historical picture. The last decade's worth of literary and historical studies of the late eighteenth century "age of democratic revolutions" has yielded rich results in both fields, even as scholars of the respective disciplines have seemingly labored in isolation from each others' discoveries across the intellectual divide. This situation is doubly unfortunate, as literary critics and historians have nonetheless assembled twin records of several emergent public spheres---literary and political, bourgeois and plebeian---across the Atlantic world that are broadly congruent, one with the other. My project corrects this situation in synthesizing these two bodies of scholarship.