Jeffersonian liberalism and the romance of history (Nathaniel Hawthorne, James Fenimore Cooper)

This dissertation argues that the fictional genre of the American historical romance represents a primary testing ground for the ethics of Jeffersonian liberalism as it emerges from Revolutionary-era political discourse. My argument proceeds in two stages: first, I examine the rhetorical consolidation of Jeffersonian political philosophy within the antebellum discourse of cultural nationalism; this historical and theoretical work then provides the critical context for rethinking the political aspects of the romance, as represented in works by Nathaniel Hawthorne and James Fenimore Cooper. Conventional accounts of U.S. liberalism define it as a neutral framework, acclaiming the priority of "the right" over "the good" in universal terms; my account critiques the ahistorical aspects of signal liberal procedures by historicizing their popular emergence in the cultural vocabulary of the antebellum period, and revealing their origins in radical Jeffersonian assertions that America was ontologically removed from history. Tracing the rhetorical posture of Jeffersonian ahistoricism in the writings of such thinkers as Ralph Waldo Emerson, John L. O'Sullivan, Parke Godwin, and Edward Everett, I reveal liberalism and cultural nationalism to be mutually dependent formations that enervated the ethical constitution of the literary public sphere in Jacksonian America. Within this cultural climate, writers and theorists of the early American romance recast abstractions about justice, politics, and nationhood into narratives in which the representational status of history itself is at issue. What is the purchase of history in the wake of national revolution? What obligations do legacies of injustice impose upon present democratic life? How is the past to be manifested in public discourse? These defining questions posed by the historical romance are, I suggest, best understood as ethical dilemmas that expose the limitations of liberal thinking, and serve to articulate competing definitions of community within an agonistic democratic culture.