Liberalism and the Early American Novel

Literary and cultural studies of the US between the 1780s and 1830s have continually faced a unique burden within the larger domain of American studies, let alone the humanities in general. Within the field, this period has often been the subject of a genteel lack of interest. Even when significant US-based Americanist scholars publish research within the time frame, the organic relation between this study and their larger reputation is often overlooked. The phase also faces categorical and political challenges. The still-dominant designation of "early" (early American Republic, early national, and so on) casts a strong developmental undertow that inevitably presents its cultural production as prefatory, a prelude to more important, or at least more fully established, movements to come. Additionally, the productive tension between history and literature (broadly understood) that once animated American studies was and is more imbalanced here than elsewhere. The dominant forms of Anglo-American historiography have a greater grip on the years before 1850, as the major intramural research institutions and grant opportunities are unquestionably organized from the vantage of history departments. Historically, and certainly before digitization's relative diminishing of the locational advantage of (East) coastal institutions, the geographic democratization of the later 1700s and early 1800s was slower to materialize than for later periods in American studies. Finally, and most importantly, the cultural study of this period has, arguably, long existed under the force of right-wing political policing and associated publishing markets, due to its proximity to constitutional origination. Indeed, were it not for the openings provided by critical slavery studies, work on settler

colonialism and indigeneity, and, to a lesser degree, the new environmental humanities, scholars of this literary-cultural field might still have little room to maneuver.

Cultural studies of the early republic and national period have also faced the continuing presence of four narrative mythologies about the US. First, largely due to the success of a broad interregional group of nineteenth-century writers, who function as both powerful exemplars for their own time and as consecrated evidentiary foundations for the establishment of American studies as a discipline throughout most of the twentieth century, the idea came about that the American Revolution directly responded to the general crisis of the seventeenth century, rather than a conflict embedded within the long spiral of resistance to British mercantilism. Thanks to authors like Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Herman Melville, later scholars took it as self-evident that the new confederation and constitutional nation was created as an exercise in antinomianism rather than as the result of British difficulties in establishing and maintaining their first, informal Empire before the demise of Napoleon. In ways that have been little investigated, the writers of the 1830s onward dedicated themselves to an invention of the seventeenth century, much as British Americans had for Roman history during the eighteenth. For a host of conjunctural reasons, not least being the search for a body of rhetorical justifications by the North for a legitimating casus belli for imminent sectional conflict, a wrinkle in time brought the seventeenth century in contact with the nineteenth, leaving the two decades on both sides of 1800 dislocated from the construction of a larger tale of US identity and what American studies understood as its proprietary archive.

Second, the obscuring of the actual context for US independence has also made it hard to fully calibrate the effects of how a dominant interpretation of Adam Smith's 1776 The Wealth of Nations arose in the early nineteenth century and became so dominant that it no longer saw itself as an interpretation at all. This version, which continues nearly unabated today, reads Smith as an advocate of competitive individuality rather than as a secular thinker grounded in the pursuit of sensibilitarian communality. Smith's arguments for the invisible hand of the market place him close to the period's deist notion of God as the absent clockmaker, and Smith's antistatism is directed against ancien regime mercantilism, not social democracy or New Deal/welfare state formations.

The result of this erasure of Smith's actual intellectual and social contexts has been...