Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

William Hill Brown's novel, The Power of Sympathy, published in Boston in 1789, is often accorded the title of the “first American novel.” The historical coincidence of the publication of The Power of Sympathy and the adoption of the US Constitution in 1789 has implicitly given currency to literary–critical understandings of the link between the political form of the nation and the literary genre of the novel. Accounts of the early American novel have taken the nation–novel connection as axiomatic: the tales of sympathy, seduction, incest, and captivity that typify early American novels have been primarily interpreted as allegories of American nationhood – as narratives that thematize the vicissitudes of citizenship and national identity in the new polity. This allegorical view is pithily embodied in John Adams's 1804 statement: “Democracy is Lovelace and the people are Clarissa.” Adams indicates that the politics of American nationhood play out as a seduction narrative: a virtuous people, like the virtuous woman, must be prepared to rebuff the advances of a libertine or suffer destruction. Adams' example has been duly followed by literary critics who have elaborated in compelling fashion the connections between particular early American novels and the state of the early republic, yet the proclivity for this model of reading has had the effect of foreclosing a range of alternative ... log in or subscribe to read full text