Revolutionary Histories: Transatlantic Cultural Nationalism, 1775-1815, and: Fragments of Union: Making Connections in Scottish and American Writing, and: The Devil & Doctor Dwight: Satire & Theology in the Early American Republic (review)

The past two decades of early American studies have seen the application of powerful new transatlantic approaches to analyzing the construction of the early United States. These approaches have recently felt pressure from coeval developments in cultural studies and postcolonial theory that envision more complex relationships between subject and nation formation. These three books grapple with this challenge in strikingly different ways, showing both the promise of and problems with a transnational American cultural history.

Revolutionary Histories is a diverse, if at times uneven, collection of essays, reflecting the multifarious approaches that first popularized transatlantic studies. W. M. Verhoeven alludes to this variety in his introduction, highlighting the "valuable degree of methodological self-consciousness" characterizing the collection (3). On display here is not simple historical or literary sleuthing but an attempt to define a new position for transatlantic studies, one to which it has been pushed by recent cultural and social criticism, and a location from which it can redefine its relevance.

Many of the essays call attention to their own methods, implicitly linking Revolutionary-era debates about historiography with current debates over historicity in transatlantic studies. Other essays revise past transatlantic investigations by looking at racial representation and print circulation. Carla Mulford's contribution, "Benjamin Franklin, Native Americans, and the Commerce of Civility," tracks the rhetorical positioning of Native Americans on both sides of the Atlantic within the discourse of civility that situated them as always in the service of competing national interests. Similarly, Robert Lawson-Peebles studies the act of blushing in England and the United States, destabilizing essentialist notions of nation and positioning a biological act within the production of ideas of nationhood.

Not every essay represents a compelling revision of transatlantic studies. Some shuttle quickly from one side of the Atlantic to the other without adequately describing the usefulness of such a comparison; only a few move beyond a binary transatlantic approach to analyses involving three or more cultures. Still, the volume's disciplinary breadth and theoretical variety suggest potentially productive methods for future study, modeled by the history of the compilation itself: the essays are products of a transatlantic conference, jointly organized by the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill and the University of Gröningen in the Netherlands.

Susan Manning begins Fragments of Union by declaring a departure from the historicism of studies like Revolutionary Histories: in place of traditional influence-based methods, she "works through more associative and analogical models of comparison initially derived from the structuring principles of the Scottish and American texts themselves" (4). Manning delineates a set of interpretive axes for reading the transatlantic deployment of plots and tropes of union, fragmentation, federation, incorporation, and boundary formation. Chapter 1, perhaps the strongest, explores the effects on Anglo-Atlantic philosophical discourse of the political struggle over models of union in the wake of the 1707 unification of Scotland and England. The options appeared to be federation—the maintenance of ties, and hence gaps, which required more theorizing about how to convince people to maintain those ties, and which promised an unsettling perpetuation of instability—or assimilation, the dissolution of particulars. Manning demonstrates, through readings of Hume's Treatise of Human Nature and its respondents (including, most significantly, Thomas Reid), how languages of politics, selfhood, and grammar drew upon common struggles with incorporation, how "an embedded political analogy within the vocabulary of union and fragmentation" structured the expression of ideas about identity (34&ndash...