'The dark fields of the Republic': Pastoral, Georgic, and the writing of empire from Cotton Mather to James Fenimore Cooper

Reading at the intersection of aesthetics and ideology, this dissertation formulates a new literary history of American pastoral and georgic to recover the imperial literature of British North America and clarify the imperial legacies of the literature of the early republic. This Anglo-American literary tradition develops within English Atlantic culture over the course of the long eighteenth century. Against the grain of current criticism, I demonstrate through close attention to twelve Anglo-American writers that literature during this period more consistently elaborated a poetics and ideology of imperial continuity rather than of postcolonial nationhood. Adaptations of georgic and pastoral in colonial and early national literature---in sermons, short and long poems, travel literature, short fiction, and the novel---are viewed in relation to the imperial ideologies and rural literatures of classical Rome and of Hanoverian England. Georgic was the preeminent aesthetic of imperial culture for English Atlantic writers during the eighteenth century. Pastoral and georgic helped domesticate the imperial presence and the cultural memory of it in North America. Through description of rural landscape and labor, in which agriculture is both paradigm and metaphor for the regeneration of culture, American rural literature progressively naturalized the work of empire: acts of conquest and exploitation become the humanizing labor of cultivation. Adapting British imperial poets' pastoral-georgic construction of the "empire of virtue", American writers helped conceptualize the formation of nation out of empire as the evolution of "nature's nation"---the imperium of "the human republic.";Within English Atlantic imperial culture, pastoral and georgic helped shape a common landscape of repression that occluded the dark sides of commerce and conquest: the landscape that erased the exploitation of rural laborers from England's cultural consciousness was extended and retouched by American writers in erasing colonialist aggression against Native Americans. The dominant literary criticism of this literature maintains an Emersonian emphasis on original relations to Nature as restorative source of American liberalism. But American rural literature focuses less on American Nature than on the violence exerted and endured in extending an empire and building a nation. Representing Nature meant redescribing violence as civilizing labor. An aesthetics of displacement and forgetting, this literature contributed to a dissociated imperial consciousness crucial to the derivation of America's "imperial republic" from Britain's "empire of virtue," which became vital between the Seven Years' War and the early republic, when the dominant image of America was forged out of the reciprocal needs to disown the violence of its imperial history, and contain the radical energies through which the republic broke from an empire to the east and expanded to the west.