Revolutionary Writers Literature and Authority in the Ne Republic, 1725-1810 [Paperback]

Elliott demonstrates how America's first men of letters--Timothy Dwight, Joel Barlow, Philip Freneau, 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 aid them, 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 mainstream American culture that would become the fate of nearly all serious writers who would follow.

This is a fine book, well organized, well argued, and well written. --Harry S. Mooney, Jr.,University of Pittsburgh

Carefully conceived, gracefully executed,Revolutionary Writersis essential reading for anyone concerned with the literature of the post-revolutionary period, and it is equally important for anyone interested in the ongoing discussion of the origins of the American self. --Early AmericanLiterature

Revolutionary Writers[is] a work that significantly redirects our understanding of American literature in the latter part of the eighteenth and the early nineteenth centuries. --The Canadian Review of American Studies