Democracy, Revolution, and Monarchism in Early American Literature

Paul Downes combines literary criticism and political history in order to explore responses to the rejection of monarchism in the American revolutionary era. Downes’ analysis considers the Declaration of Independence, Franklin’s Autobiography, Crèvecoeur’s Letters From An American Farmer, and the works of America’s first significant literary figures including Brockden Brown, Washington Irving and James Fennimore Cooper. He claims that the new democratic American state and citizen inherited some of the complex features of absolute monarchy, even as they were strenuously trying to assert their difference from it. In chapters that consider the revolution’s mock execution of George III, the Elizabethan notion of the ‘king’s two bodies’, and the political significance of the secret ballot, Downes points to the traces of monarchical political structures within the practices and discourses of early American democracy. This is an ambitious study of an important theme in early American culture and society.

• Broad ranging study covering the foundation of the American Republic • Theme is broad, important, and central to American literary studies • Genuinely interdisciplinary, so should be of interest to historians

Introduction: the spell of democracy; 1. Monarchophobia: reading the mock executions of 1776; 2. Crèvecoeur’s revolutionary loyalism; 3. Citizen subjects: the memoirs of Stephen Burroughs and Benjamin Franklin; 4. An epistemology of the ballot box: Brockden Brown’s secrets; 5. Luxury, effeminacy, corruption: Irving and the gender of democracy; Afterword: The revolution’s last word.

MLA Book Prize 2002 - Winner

\'A valuable new reading of American Revolutionary culture.\' American Literature