Writing the Rebellion: Loyalists and the Literature of Politics in British America by Philip Gould (review)

In his introduction, Philip Gould poses the question, “Why has Revolutionary literary studies largely ignored the writing that opposed the American rebellion?” (6). In other words, why do Americanists study the winners and almost completely ignore the losers? Gould points to literary scholars’ fondness for narrative and how Revolutionary War writing serves as a perfect point of origin for cultural and creative independence that effortlessly leads into antebellum American literature and the American Renaissance. Gould praises the contributions of Michael Warner, Jay Fliegelman, Christopher Looby, and Robert A. Ferguson for broadly expanding our knowledge of the era but nonetheless locates an insistence on a “national critical teleology” (6) or a “nationalist literary historiography” (7) that dismisses Loyalist authors and printers and their influence on revolutionary culture.¹

In Writing the Rebellion, Gould impresses the reader with a succinct and cogent argument: that “the Loyalist presence changes the ways in which we read the political literature of this period and produces a new image of the complex political and cultural dynamics shaping British Americans’ renegotiations of their fraught and often damaged relation to ‘English’ culture” (8). According to Gould, both Patriots and Loyalists identified with English literary culture and its long tradition of wit, burlesque, satire, and the sublime. The difference, though, between a Loyalist and a Patriot was “not who embraced English culture but how they did so” (8). Gould overturns stereotypical images of the Loyalist as “the hopeless anglophile,” the “elitist aristocrat” (9), and “being two things at once—British subjects and American indigents” (10). Alternatively, Gould cites Edward Larkin’s historical description of a Loyalist as someone “who favored reconciliation with Great Britain during the conflicts that began with the Stamp Act and concluded with the War of 1812” (9). Extrapolating on Larkin’s terms, Gould writes that Loyalists suffered from the “unsettling crisis of being nowhere and alone” (10). Gould’s redefinition of the Loyalist as neither American nor British, but alone, complicates the transatlantic categories of the “local” and “imperial” (23). Writing the Rebellion illustrates that Loyalists experienced violence in the local arena and disregard from the imperial domain, resulting in a terrifying sense of dislocation.

In addition to transatlantic methods and theory, Writing the Rebellion is indebted to a rich literature on the history of the book. Gould makes certain that readers understand that his study is neither revisionist nor celebratory, explaining, “My intention is not to turn the Revolution’s losers into winners, but to analyze the literature of politics in ways that adhere to their historical publication, dissemination, and reception” (23). To organize his analysis of the literature of politics and its circulation, he selects three events central to Revolutionary print culture: the Stamp Act controversy, the calling of the Continental Congress and the enactment of the Continental Association, and the publication and reception of Thomas Paine’s Common Sense (1776). According to Gould, these events “inaugurated and intensified the political crisis and raised further questions about Anglo-American cultural affiliation” (27).

Gould commences his fascinating study of the connection between aesthetics, literary form, and national identity with the passage of the Stamp Act. He narrates the story of an effigy of a Loyalist stamp master in Newport, Rhode Island. Patriots labeled the effigy “Martinius Scriblerus” (31), a name that ironically was aligned with the Tory wits in London, including Alexander Pope, Jonathon Swift, and others. Gould brilliantly takes this unique historical moment and interrogates its literary and national meanings as Patriots and Loyalists used the traditions of sublimity and bombast inherited from the metropole to represent and shape their political positions. British authors such as Edmund Burke and Joseph Addison, as well as classical authors such as Longinus, deployed the sublime as a literary trope to describe the conflicting emotions of delight and horror. Loyalists and Patriots, according to Gould, dismissed each other’s use of...