'Pens of the Democratic Party': Nationalism, politics, and creative literature in 'The United States Magazine and Democratic Review', 1837--1845

This dissertation explores the critical and creative development of Democratic ideas in ante-bellum nationalist literature, focusing in particular on John Louis O'Sullivan's Democratic Review, an important monthly journal which published works by leading authors of American literary history from Nathaniel Hawthorne, Walt Whitman, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, and Edgar Allan Poe to Lydia Sigourney, William Cullen Bryant, James Russell Lowell and John Greenleaf Whittier. While literary scholars have attended to the non-literary writings of the magazine, the creative literature that comprised half of its total content has received much less scholarly treatment. My central claim is that the aesthetic and political contributions of the Democratic Review reveal the highly pluralistic notions of democracy and American nationality in the crucial ante-bellum years of national emergence. By contextualizing periodical works of significant American writers, in particular Hawthorne, Sedgwick, Bryant, and Whittier, this dissertation redresses extant treatments of literary nationalism in the ante-bellum period by investigating its flowering in a major American periodical—a focus which enables us to recapture the political implications of major literary texts and to recognize the vital political significance of women's sentimental writings. My analysis of the contributions of writers such as Sedgwick to O'Sullivan's magazine establishes the connections, both profound and varied, between nationalist writings and the development of American democratic ideology. By detailing a literary-critical context in which political ideas were recognized as intimately tied to aesthetic ideals, this dissertation seeks to recuperate a contemporary political language with implications for literary as well as intellectual historians. While the Democratic Review represents one of many important cultural institutions in nineteenth-century America dedicated to the construction of American nationalism, the magazine is exceptional not only for the ties it established between an evolving nationalism and equally provisional Democratic ideas, but for its confirmation of the extent to which Democratic politics mattered to ante-bellum literary writers.