Customer Reviews

Literary Federalism in the Age of Jefferson: Joseph Dennie and the Port Folio, 1801-1812 (Literary Studies)

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This book has totally opened my eyes to a new relation between American literature and politics. I'm a grad student working on a dissertation on Emerson, and got hold of page proofs of this book because my advisor had them for review. This book argues that the whole notion of American lit as "a world elsewhere" -- as Richard Poirier called it: a world existing in language apart from politics and history -- lies in the relation between literature and politics during the years of Jefferson's presidency. The argument is immensely complex, but the bottom line is that there were two visions of America competing at around the time of 1800: the Federalist vision of America as an organic community based on civic virtue and mutual obligation, and the Jeffersonian vision based on radical French doctrines of equality, with a basis in radical individualism. Dowling's argument is that Jeffersonian radical individualism won, to the point that it has been our "national ideology" ever since. Not just the glorification of the "free" individual, but a market economy, consumerism, emphasis on consumption and "self-expression" through the market, and a mass democracy based on mass taste (TV, supermarkets, etc). The argument of the book is that Federalists, by the time Jefferson's second term had ended, knew that the vision of a "communitarian America" had vanished forever. So they moved the classical republic vision of the American republic into literature, where it became a mode of expression and moral witness. The process starts in Joseph Dennie's Port Folio magazine -- I never even knew it existed before I read this book -- but then continues through Irving, Thoreau, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Charles Eliot Norton, Henry James, and Henry Adams (to name just a few in the tradition of what Dowling calls "literary Federalism." So American literature becomes "America in exile" -- a vision of America vanished from the realm of politics and taking up a new home inside language and the literary imagination. This is a really exciting book. After reading 200 books about gender and identity politics and "the postcolonial other" and similar exercises in empty trendiness, it hit me like a revelation. I've thrown out the whole earlier draft of my Emerson dissertation and am starting all over again.