Brockden Brown, Edgar Huntly, Or Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker (New York: Penguin, 1988), p. 3.
45Clinton Rossiter, ‘Nationalism and American identity in the early republic’, in Sean Wilentz (ed.), Major Problems in the Early Republic: 1787–1848 (Lexington: D. C. Heath, 1992), pp. 14–23 (pp. 14–15).
46J. Hector St Jean de Crèvecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer, in Nina Baym et al. (eds), Norton Anthology of American Literature, Vol. 1 (4th edn; New York: W. W. Norton, 1994), pp. 657–81 (pp. 659, 660).
47William L. Hedges, ‘The myth of the republic and the theory of American literature’, Prospects, 4 (1974), 101–20 (110).
48Michael Warner, The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990), p. 119.
49Quoted in Charles Brockden Brown, Wieland, ed. Jay Fliegelman (New York: Penguin, 1991), p. xxvi.
50Warner, Letters of the Republic, p. 120.
51Chris Baldick and Robert Mighall, ‘Gothic criticism’, in David Punter (ed.), A Companion to the Gothic (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), pp. 209–28 (pp. 216, 215, 218). For psychological readings of the Gothic, see Anne Williams, Art of Darkness: A Poetics of Gothic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); William Patrick Day, In the Circles of Fear and Desire: A Study of Gothic Fantasy (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1985); Carol Ann Howells, Love, Mystery and Misery: Feeling in Gothic Fiction (London: Athlone Press, 1975).
52Baldick and Mighall, ‘Gothic criticism’, pp. 213, 214, 215, 226.
53Marilyn Butler, ‘Introduction’, in Marilyn Butler (ed.), Burke, Paine, Godwin, and the Revolution Controversy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 3.
54Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto (London: Oxford University Press, 1982), pp. 7, 12.
55Caroline Robbins, ‘The strenuous Whig: Thomas Hollis of Lincoln’s Inn’, William and Mary Quarterly, 7, 3 (1950), 406–53 (409).
56Miles, ‘“Tranced Griefs”’, 158.
57J. G. A. Pocock, ‘Gibbon’s decline and fall and the world view of the late Enlightenment’, Eighteenth Century Studies, 10, 3 (1977), 287–303 (293).
58J. G. A. Pocock, Virtue, Commerce, and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 231.
59Pocock, ‘Gibbon’s decline and fall’, 288.
60 Maggie Kilgour, The Rise of the Gothic Novel (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 13.
61Edmund Burke, ‘Reflections on the revolution in France and on the proceedings in certain societies in London relative to that event’, in The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, vol. II (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1854), p. 350.
62E. J. Clery and Robert Miles (eds), Gothic Documents: A Sourcebook, 1700–1820 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), p. 246; Miles, ‘“Tranced Griefs”’, 163.
63Clery and Miles, Gothic Documents, p. 48.
64Kilgour, The Rise of the Gothic Novel, p. 14.
65Samuel Kliger, ‘Emerson and the usable Anglo-Saxon past’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 16, 4 (1955), 476–93 (476–7).
66Thomas Jefferson to John Norwell (14 June 1807), Jefferson Digital Archive, University of Virginia Library, http://etext.lib.virginia.edu (accessed 3 March 2005).
67Clery and Miles, Gothic Documents, p. 2.
68Daniel Rogers, ‘Republicanism: the career of a concept’, The Journal of American History, 79, 1 (1992), 11–38 (11).
In 1985, the American Quarterly devoted an entire issue to the topic of republicanism and in the following year, the William and Mary Quarterly indexed the term for the first time in its ninety-four year history. The addition of the category ‘republicanism’ in these two eminent journals of history and culture reflects the intense interest and often-acrimonious debate orbiting the term since the 1960s. As one critic observed, republicanism was the one concept that could unlock the riddles of American politics and culture.1 It represented an agreeable substitution for the increasingly pejorative term ‘national’ and a new found interest in language and ideology as an expression of the American political and cultural condition. Yet, for others, it was imbued with vagueness and contradiction:
[t]o insist on the ‘essence’ of republicanism had the effect of driving the term republican into the realm of metaphor and uncertainty, making it vulnerable to a host of alternate and conflicting definitions. It would be available to signify almost anything so long as it was nonmonarchical. It would become rich in overtones, useable in alternate contexts: we find ourselves speaking of republican religion, republican children, republican motherhood.2
By the 1980s republicanism had become a ‘protean concept’, a ‘vocabulary’ and an ‘ideology’, useable for a host of interpretative needs: ‘The recent discovery of republicanism as the reigning social theory of eighteenth-century America has produced a reaction among historians akin to the response of chemists to a new element. Once having been identified, it can be found everywhere.’3 The interest in republicanism represented a sea change in how historians approached revolutionary history and eighteenth-century American culture. The change took place after the Second World War and the coming of the cold war when the values and beliefs that had clarified American political and social culture were being re-evaluated and reformulated in what historians have called a ‘paradigm shift of major proportions’.4 Whether viewed as the rhetoric of classical political theory or an explanation of how ideas actually shaped events, the shift revealed that the concept of republicanism is ‘bound up . . . with a complex of theories about language and consciousness . . . and has surreptitiously inserted into our history the conviction that reality is socially constructed’.5
In order to grasp the magnitude of this change, a short overview of the prevailing approaches to American history during the interwar and post-war years is useful. Certainly, interpretations of the American Revolution and the early national period have undergone numerous transformations from the beginning when participants began to record their impressions of what was happening to subsequent views of the revolution in the setting of British imperialism. However, in the first half of the twentieth century, ideas, or the intellectual context, of early American culture receded from view and new methodologies emerged to explain the character of the nation. From the socioeconomic theories of Carl Becker and Charles Beard to the liberal consensus model advanced by Louis Hartz, Daniel J. Boorstin and Richard Hofstadter, revolutionary historiography was decidedly anti-ideological. For Progressives, who combined Marxist and Freudian thought to understand the underlying drives and interests that determine social behaviour, the revolution and the formation of the constitution was explained primarily as a conflict between different power
