| This dissertation proposes the existence of a post-republic, where outmoded ideas of republicanism could not keep pace with history, and when some literary producers could deploy those very ideas experimentally to explore ideas such as representation, the public and the private, and individual identity. These, the very concepts that republicanism itself deploys, find new expression in new contexts in the work of Irving, Hawthorne, Sedgwick and Douglass. In this dissertation these contexts include intertexts and interlocutors---cultural modalities and cultural producers---that these writers lived among and interacted with in the course of fashioning their own post-republican worldview and composing their experimental literary forms. Because its generates literary criticism, theses about historical transmission, and cultural criticism, this dissertation enters a conversation about the nineteenth century in dialogue with scholars such as Trish Loughran and Sean Wilentz, who theorize historical transformation and define wide semiotic fields in order to posit, and then destabilize paradigms such as the nation and democracy. This dissertation likewise attempts to posit republicanism as a paradigm that sheds light on one structure of nineteenth-century American life, while showing how that structure is itself rich with inconsistencies that some Americans could use to explain their present tense.;Chapter one, "'The Mutability of Literature': Washington Irving's Post-republican Literary Experiments in The Sketch Book," explores the idea of literature as a mode of writing history and of mediating relationships between one person and his readers in the large semiotic field of literary culture in the 1810s and 1820s. Along with proponents and administrators of public libraries, Irving negotiates the problem of imagining a relationship between a writer and the many readers he will, in mediated fashion, come into contact with. This chapter engages scholarship about genre, postmodern ideas of authorship, and institutional histories of libraries and library studies in order to claim that genre and institutions can be read for similarities using the lens of literary form and republicanism.;Chapter two, "'Our joys have clustered': Post-republican Narrative Strategies in Catharine Maria Sedgwick's A New-England Tale," explores the distinctions between novelistic and republican conceptions of historical progress. Sedgwick is a person heavily invested in the idea of the discourse of family as something that preserves virtue in new generations of her immediate family and in Americans in general, but is also acutely aware of the ways private life and public life are beginning to diverge from their republican meanings. Drawing on political histories of the Jacksonian era as well as feminist literary scholarship, this chapter also argues that the relationships signaled by the idea of family provide a narrative framework that expanded the possibilities for republican ideas about relationships between individuals and a community, even as those possibilities were generated simultaneously from within the framework of republicanism.;Chapter three, "'Another View of Hester': Nathaniel Hawthorne's Novel and the Biographical Stance at the End of the Republic," explores Hawthorne's approach to writing biography and history and the propriety of a narrator's task of relating another person's story to a wide audience under any circumstances. Writing closer to the end of the post-republic than Irving and Sedgwick, Hawthorne---in The Scarlet Letter, "The Custom-House," and his campaign biography of Franklin Pierce---proposes that narrative has become, finally, divorced from republicanism. I read "The Custom-House" as a first-person account of writing fiction under the authority of a republic that has become identified with the state. Here the task of writing is itself divided between the bureaucratic work of overseeing and recording the commercial activity of a port and the imaginative work of a romance writer. I read his response to this situation in The Scarlet Letter---a return to a past beyond the eighteenth century and the early republic---as an attempt to re-create a social world by re-narrating an American origin, effectively installing a nineteenth-century narrative consciousness prior to the formation of a republican ideology.;The dissertation's epilogue, "'Fellow Citizens': Frederick Douglass and the Irony of Post-republicanism," revisits the tropes and literary performance of Webster's commemorative address at Bunker Hill by giving a close reading of Frederick Douglass's speech to abolitionists in Rochester, New York commemorating the Fourth of July in 1852. In the speech, Douglass positions himself within the patriotic discourse of the Revolution, but he also positions himself against the republican historiographic imagination that he claims influences the ways Americans remember the Revolution. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)... |
