Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 56-07, Section: A, page: 2742.

Director: Michael Denning.

American fiction rose in the 1790s out of the local effects of the French Revolution. After inter-European blockades left Americans in control of the lucrative Caribbean trade, vocational opportunities changed for a post-colonial generation. The trans-Atlantic shipping boom produced a new rank of clerks for its increased need of duplicated contracts, ledgers, and legal writs. Uneasily placed between merchants and mechanics, pressured by competition for employment by immigrants, and encouraged by Anglo-Jacobin writings about renovating personal relations, these pensmen turned to fiction as their field of establishment. The novel flourished as sentimentalism, impressed by radical ideology, began to represent the challenges to traditional authority by popular republicanism, the urban mannerisms of business interests, and the new sensational goods of fashion and taste. As domestic fiction used Virtue simultaneously as a definition of polity and gendered sexuality, its family narratives explore the potential and limits of alternative national and personal identities.

Charles Brockden Brown's novels epitomize the period's literary dynamics. Wieland reconsiders Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography as a model of personal advancement that evades democratic transparency in its celebration of exclusive, male networks. Arthur Mervyn depicts the decade's endemic poverty, its institutional schemes of welfare and yellow fever plague management, and, along with Godwin, Malthus and Benjamin Thompson, the relation between desire, discipline, and social amelioration. Amid percolating college riots, subversion panics (like the Illuminati scare), and debates about free thought and female education, Ormond portrays transvestite action as the fulfillment of the political Enlightenment, which liberates the individual subject from the past's governmental constraints. As changing urban opportunities facilitated gay male communalization, Brown represents same-sex desire in Edgar Huntly and Stephen Calvert and distinguishes an American literary Gothic by its replacement of (European) self-alienation in favor of amorous dignity. By 1800, Continental revolutionary energies were contained, American mercantilism declined, and the novel, which was contingent on these forces, evaporated. Brown's final novels, Clara Howard and Jane Talbot, retrospectively consider why the decade's visionary projects failed and were unable to resist the emerging culture of transcendental utilitarianism.