The Ends of Republicanism

White examines two Jeffersonian era texts, Charles Brockden Brown's unfinished "Historical Sketches" and William Jenks's Memoir of the Northern Kingdom, in order to explore what literary texts might tell us about the waning of republicanism as a literary and political force. Both works in question combine historical pessimism and counterfactual history to suggest that republicanism had become (and may have always been) a literary lexicon.