Vernacular Columbia: The practice of community in post-revolutionary American literature (Philip Freneau, Susanna Rowson, William Dunlap, Charles Brockden Brown, Lenora Sansay)

Vernacular Columbia challenges the consensus about the parallel development of nation and culture in early America. In it, I consider drama, pamphlet literature, history writing, travel narratives, and eyewitness accounts to ask how writers imagined practical collective agency and investigated the limits of imagined communal solidarity. Departing from the influential rubric of the “national imaginary,” I focus on the representation and practice of local, regional and circum-Atlantic affiliation in the theater and in the marketplace for prose literature. Despite the apotheosis of the United States following political independence from England, the dynamics of colonialism and empire continued to structure the practices of communality both in early republican America and throughout the hemisphere. I describe not only the legacy of colonial forms of communal practice but their persistence and reanimation as well in post-revolutionary contexts. Because African slavery and the slave-trade were among the most visible and intransigent institutions yoking the colonial and post-revolutionary eras, I have asked how a variety of communal practices and vernacular discourses accommodated or contested these institutions.; My use of “Columbia” calls attention to the importance of hemispheric political and social change. In particular, I track representations of the Haitian Revolution in turn-of-the-century Anglophone literature. Haiti, I argue, not only represented a challenge to existing and emergent racial ideologies, but to theories of communality and collective agency as well. I use the term “vernacular” to cut across generic categories that needlessly separate closely related acts of imaginative writing. A vernacular also denotes locality and highlights performance. The elaboration of a vernacular Columbia, then, aims to contest the critically privileged genre of the novel for understanding the cultures of post-revolutionary America. Against the novel-form, I focus on the eighteenth-century, Anglo-American theater to explore alternative modes of cultural practice. I draw on a theoretical foundation that aims to understand the situational agency of cultural products and their producers. Chapters that follow include attention to Philip Freneau, Susanna Rowson, William Dunlap, Charles Brockden Brown, and Leonora Sansay.