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Current Issue Article Abstracts Summer 2010 Vol. 30.2 • • • • • • • • The Ends of Republicanism Ed White White examines two Jeffersonian era texts, Charles Brockden Brown's unfinished "Historical Sketches" and William Jenks's Memoir of the Northern Kingdom, in order to explore what literary texts might tell us about the waning of republicanism as a literary and political force. Both works in question combine historical pessimism and counterfactual history to suggest that republicanism had become (and may have always been) a literary lexicon. The Genius of Latitude: Daniel Webster and the Geographical Imagination in Early America Christopher Apap Daniel Webster's importance to the political debates of the early nation has long been recognized; here I argue that he also vitally contributed to the way that national identity came to be construed in geographical terms. Looking specifically at Webster's most famous oration, his "Second Reply to Hayne" (1830), I study Webster's blueprint for a sectional identity centered in New England. Though the construction of local identities has been lauded as a key form of resistance to national and global hegemonizing forces, Webster is an especially useful figure to explore the ways in which locality may serve both conservative and radical purposes. Webster not only represents New England as a synecdoche for the nation; he takes this to the logical extreme by drawing a line starkly between North and South. To this extent, Webster's most literary of legacies is his ability to re-draw the boundaries of section and nation and his recognition that the nation is much more flexible a construct than any simple map would suggest. Moving beyond the boundaries of the early republic, the "Second Reply" serves as a springboard to examine the ways that the representations of the increasingly calcified sectional tensions of the 1820s and early 1830s had profound geographical and political implications that reverberated throughout the continent and across the Atlantic world. The article as a whole articulates an understanding of an early American geographical imagination that was supple enough to simultaneously address local, national and transnational contexts. "Mouth for God": Temperate Labor, Race, and Methodist Reform in William Apess's A Son of the Forest Mark J. Miller Apess's early work with Methodist reformers indicates that his relationship to Methodism is more complicated, and more central to his anticolonial critique, than most critics suggest. Focusing on the value of temperance in reformist Methodist organizing and publicity, this article establishes the importance of reformist Methodist temperance for Apess's development of an Indian male public subject grounded in bodily self-control. I read Apess's two editions of A Son of the Forest (1829 and 1831) alongside reformist Methodist periodicals from Baltimore and New York, where reformers participated in the development of African American and labor publics before following the Methodist Episcopal Church in their adoption of the polite style of the evangelic mainstream. Apess used reformist Methodist rhetoric and organizing to create an Indian subject capable of full participation in the early republic's urban and print public spheres, modifying the tactics of eighteenth-century Christian Indian writing and anticipating the more militant nineteenth-century rhetoric of Indian resistance. "A Warm Politition and Devotedly Attached to the Democratic Party": Catharine Read Williams, Politics, and Literature in Antebellum America Susan Graham In order to demonstrate the persistence of "female politicians" in the antebellum period, this article explores Catherine Read Williams's use of publication to advance her partisan agenda. A staunch yet unlikely Democrat, Williams engaged in politics and used publishing to promote Democratic positions on controversial issues such as slavery and Indian removal. In addition, Williams employed history to emphasize the strong and politically active role of women in the American past. In Rhode Island's 1842 Dorr Rebellion, Williams took a fervent public stance in favor of expanding suffrage to all white men. At a time when it was unacceptable for women to be publicly partisan, her confrontational style rendered her exceptional from even politically engaged women of her era. She pushed the gendered boundaries of Jacksonianism by aggressively supporting Democratic policy, depicting heroic women in her historical narratives, and commanding a political presence in her community. Williams's career as a historian and bold political activist reveals the presence of public female partisanship in American political culture during the antebellum period. Literature and Politics in the Early Republic: Views from the Bridge Catherine O'Donnell This essay surveys recent scholarship on secular literature and politics in the early republic. The work of Jurgen Habermas and Benedict Anderson has influenced scholarship focusing on the constitutive power of print during this era. Gender scholarship has contributed investigation of the implicit and explicit exclusions of print communities, as well as of the contributions of women authors and readers to the national imaginary. Research into literary networks has made visible the human infrastructure of print capitalism and political parties. Other scholars have explored the relationship between literature and politics through periodicals and children's literature, attempting to use those sources to penetrate the mystery of how texts were read. In general, the scholarship of literature and politics has emphasized nation-building and national distinctiveness, even as American exceptionalism has been criticized in other realms. But recent work on the Atlantic world and on Latin American-United States connections, as well as on African American "counterpublics," has brought the relevance of transnational and subnational communities to the fore. The essay concludes by calling for more attention to the imaginative and emotional purposes of politics and literature, as well as to the development of separate cultural and political elites during the early republican era. |
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