The uses of the epic impulse in American culture, 1770--1876

This study reassesses American literary history by placing epic at the center of that history. As the most internationally prestigious form of poetry at the time of American Independence, epic provided an obvious starting point for constructing a national literature, but the narrative conventions of epic focused possibilities for telling the national story. By focusing on "epic impulse" rather than on taxonomic senses of form, I trace the roles that epic played in the development of American literature as well as law and history writing. Throughout the chronology of this project, I highlight the changing meanings of epic: from a noun to an adjective in dictionary definitions, and from a convention-bound genre to a form-blending mode that authors often engaged by consciously identifying the tradition from which it descended---whether from Homer or from Native American sagas. The story of literary epic in the United States interweaves here with political history, history of the book, and transatlantic cultural and economic developments, revealing that the modern history of an ancient form and the emergent history of the United States were mutually constitutive.; Chapter One articulates the dramas between regional manuscript cultures and the systems of transatlantic printing in which dozens of epics participated during the republic's first decades. Expanding on the role of epic in nation-making, Chapter Two demonstrates how epic canons were used to develop American constitutional law through texts from the Federalist to Supreme Court opinions to John Marshall's Life of George Washington. Chapter Three reconstructs the transatlantic processes underlying the Transcendentalists' reconsideration of the scope of epic before focusing on Longfellow's Evangeline and The Song of Hiawatha as epics written expressly as world literature. Chapter Four analyzes Melville's career as that of an epicist across genres, as he modeled his self-conception as an author in terms of epic authors of the past, from Carlyle and Dante to Milton, Homer, and Camoens, from Mardi through Moby-Dick to Melville's late poetry. My study ends with a brief discussion of epic's later evolution from a literary to an aesthetic category mediated by new technologies such as film.