Revolutionary Writers: Literature and Authority in the New Republic, 1725-1810
Elliott demonstrates how America's first men of letters--Timothy Dwight, Joel Barlow, Philip Frenan,...
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Elliott demonstrates how America's first men of letters--Timothy Dwight, Joel Barlow, Philip Frenan, Hugh Henry Brackenridge, and Charles Brockden Brown--sought to make individual genius in literature express the collective genius of the American people. Without literary precedent to aidthem, Elliott argues, these writers attempted to convey a vision of what America ought to be--and when the moral imperatives implicit in their writings, were rejected by the vast number of their countrymen they became pioneers of another sort--the first to experience the alienation from mainstreamAmerican culture that would become the fate of nearly all serious writers who would follow.
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