The Literature of the Early Republic

Historical and social background

The early Republic era (Vietto) commonly divided into three periods: the Revolutionary War
and early years under the Articles of Confederation; the ratification of the Constitution and
Bill of Rights; and the Democratic-Republican administrations of the first quarter of the
nineteenth century.
The American Revolution as a response to some historical events and new philosophical ideas:,
the Great Awakening (a religious movement that reacted against the increasing secularization of
the colonies), the economic conflicts between Britain and the colonies, and the influence of the
Enlightenment ideals (justice, freedom, equality, emphasis on reason).
The Literature of the early Republican Period
.Shaped by new material conditions such as: more and better printers, an increasing number of
magazines and the introduction of copyright laws in 1790.
.A greater unprecedented concern with the development of a national literary tradition.
American men of letters aware that American culture possessed unique features which should
allow them to create truly American works: native people, slavery, the irrelevance of social
status, the republican virtue. Little attention paid to the literature of this period precisely
because literary historians thought it was still too imitative of British models. A view
reconsidered in the 1980s and 1990s.
Literary influences:
Alexander Popes and James Thomsons neoclassical poems, Joseph Addisons and Richard
Steeles essays in The Spectator (17111712), Samuel Richardsons epistolary and sentimental
novels Pamela (1740) and Clarissa (17471748), Horace Walpoles and Ann Radcliffes gothic
novels.
Main literary kinds:
.Biography and autobiography: Life-writing continued to be very popular.
.Poetry: strongly influenced by Neoclassical poetics. Emphasis on the didactic nature of works.
Concern with imitation in the sense of objective representation, and objective in the sense that
the subject should not appear.
.The novel: Perhaps the most notable change in American literature in the period following
the Revolution was the development of an American tradition of the novel (Vietto). Two main
kinds: the sentimental and the Gothic. Sentimental fiction reflected the eighteenth-century
notion of sensibility: the individuals capacity for sympathetic and empathetic emotional
response. Often stories of seduction or attempted seduction of innocent young women:
Susanna Haswell Rowsons Charlotte: A Tale of Truth (1791; better known as Charlotte Temple)
and Hannah Webster Fosters The Coquette (1797).
.Gothic, stories which exploited the supernatural and the irrational to evoke horror. Isaac
Mitchell, The Asylum; or Alonzo and Melissa (1811).
Bibliography
Augustyn, Adam. American Literature from 1600 through 1850s. New York: Britannica
Educational Publishing, 2011.
Gray, Richard. A History of American Literature. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004
Meyers, Karen. Colonialism and the Revolutionary Road. New York: Facts on File, 2006
Vietto, Angela. Early American Literature, 1776-1820. New York: Facts on File, 2010.