Translation, Counterrevolution, and the Early American Novel: Richard Alsop's The Lovers of La Vendée, or Revolutionary Tyranny

This essay examines The Lovers of La Vendée (1808), the Connecticut Wit Richard Alsop's translation of the French author Étienne Gosse's 1799 novel Les amans vendéens. The interventions that Alsop made in order to conform the text to his own values reflect the ongoing significance of revolutionary France in US political and literary discourse in the first decade of the nineteenth century. Drawing on insights from translation studies, I argue that this text troubles the boundary between original and copy and further expands the category of American literature—and, moreover, that the traditional exclusion of translations from the field of early American literary studies has played a role in shaping received notions about the relationship between democracy and American literature.