The American Revolution in Nineteenth-Century Fiction
Open Access
- Author:
- Kennedy, Dustin Michael
- Graduate Program:
- English
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- July 16, 2012
- Committee Members:
- Hester Maureen Blum, Dissertation Advisor/Co-Advisor
Christopher Dean Castiglia, Committee Member
Sean X Goudie, Committee Member
Wilson J Moses, Committee Member
Aldon Lynn Nielsen, Committee Member - Keywords:
- nationalism
American Revolution
working-class
abolitionism
Charles Brockden Brown
Irving
Lippard
Melville
Lydia Child - Abstract:
- This project investigates how nineteenth-century writers portrayed the American Revolution in fiction. Nationalism is typically described as a homogenizing social force, one that crafts a sense of unity among a civic body – but also one that excludes minority populations. I argue that U.S. nationalism was constructed around eighteenth-century conceptions of the liberal citizen, characterized by the ability to enter the political discussion found in the public sphere by assuming the mantle of “virtuous disinterest,” a commitment to rationalism, and above all the belief in the ability to act without restraint. These traits are coincident with the rise of middle-class political power in the Age of Revolution. As U.S. society moved towards industrial modes of production over the nineteenth century, writers retold the story of the Revolution in order to affiliate new political positions with the ideals and values of the nation. Proponents of both class and abolitionist politics took up this work with the aim of changing (or revolutionizing) society. For proponents of working-class interests, this meant challenging the liberal beliefs that equated being American with economic success – and that relegated economic interests to the apolitical order of the private sphere. For abolitionists, it meant challenging the belief that people of African descent had a political destiny separate from the nation. For both, it meant understanding that the body was as important in constructing identity as the mind and that the ability to act was always conditioned by social limitations. My dissertation shows how the Revolution was culturally imagined first as the outgrowth of liberal values as demonstrated in the fiction of Charles Brockden Brown and Washington Irving, and then was challenged by writers with working-class and abolitionist politics such as George Lippard, Herman Melville, William Wells Brown and Lydia Maria Child.