Description
- Abstract:
- This dissertation?"Out of the Many, One: Reading the Federal Republic, 1776-1870"? explores the relationship between early American literature and the political philosophy of federalism in the antebellum period. In contrast to studies that characterize early American writing as a means of uniting citizens through bonds of shared sympathy and similarity, I argue that early American literary texts redefined the terms of national unity and citizenship by encouraging readers to recognize the nation as a collection of distinct, diverse, and disparate regional communities. By reading the novels of Royall Tyler, Timothy Flint, Catharine Sedgwick, and William Gilmore Simms, and the regional periodicals of the American West and South, I trace the relationship between U.S. literature and the federal concept of "unity in difference," showing how literary texts helped promote a "federal literacy" that would alternately support and undermine the terms of union and citizenship in the years between the founding of the republic and the Civil War.
- Notes:
- Thesis (Ph.D.) -- Brown University (2008)
Access Conditions
- Rights
- In Copyright
- Restrictions on Use
- Collection is open for research.
Citation
Holt, Kerin,
"Out of the Many, One: Reading the Federal Republic, 1776-1865"
(2008).
English Theses and Dissertations.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://doi.org/10.7301/Z00K26VC
