Explore the vast range of titles available.

Intricate Relations charts the development of the novel in and beyond the early republic in relation to these two thematic and intricately connected centers: sexuality and economics. By reading fiction written by Americans between 1789 and 1814 alongside medical theory, political and economic tracts, and pedagogical literature of all kinds, Karen Weyler recreates and illuminates the larger, sometimes opaque, cultural context in which novels were written, published, and read. In 1799, the novelist Charles Brockden Brown used the evocative phrase \"intricate relations\" to describe the complex imbrication of sexual and economic relations in the early republic. Exploring these relationships, he argued, is the chief job of the \"moral historian,\" a label that most novelists of the era embraced. In a republic anxious about burgeoning individualism in the 1790s and the first two decades of the nineteenth century, the novel foregrounded sexual and economic desires and explored ways to regulate the manner in which they were expressed and gratified. InIntricate Relations, Weyler argues that understanding how these issues underlie the novel as a genre is fundamental to understanding both the novels themselves and their role in American literary culture. Situating fiction amid other popular genres illuminates how novelists such as Charles Brockden Brown, Hannah Foster, Samuel Relf, Susanna Rowson, Rebecca Rush, and Sally Wood synthesized and iterated many of the concerns expressed in other forms of public discourse, a strategy that helped legitimate their chosen genre and make it a viable venue for discussion in the decades following the revolution. Weyler's passionate and persuasive study offers new insights into the civic role of fiction in the early republic and will be of great interest to literary theorists and scholars in women's and American studies.

Standing outside elite or even middling circles, outsiders who were marginalized by limitations on their freedom and their need to labor for a living had a unique grasp on the profoundly social nature of print and its power to influence public opinion. In Empowering Words, Karen A. Weyler explores how outsiders used ephemeral formats such as broadsides, pamphlets, and newspapers to publish poetry, captivity narratives, formal addresses, and other genres with wide appeal in early America. To gain access to print, outsiders collaborated with amanuenses and editors, inserted their stories into popular genres and cheap media, tapped into existing social and religious networks, and sought sponsors and patrons. They wrote individually, collaboratively, and even corporately, but writing for them was almost always an act of connection. Disparate levels of literacy did not necessarily entail subordination on the part of the lessliterate collaborator. Even the minimally literate and the illiterate understood the potential for print to be life changing, and outsiders shrewdly employed strategies to assert themselves within collaborative dynamics. Empowering Words covers an array of outsiders including artisans; the minimally literate; the poor, indentured, or enslaved; and racial minorities. By focusing not only on New England, the traditional stronghold of early American literacy, but also on southern towns such as Williamsburg and Charleston, Weyler limns a more expansive map of early American authorship.

This dissertation examines the transatlantic literary culture of the United States between 1789 and 1820. I explore the relationships between fiction and other modes of discourse--medical theory, political and economic tracts, and pedagogical literature of all kinds--in order to illustrate the engagement of fiction with social, political, and cultural issues during the early national era. Fiction's ability to appropriate the authority of other modes of discourse both informed and enabled its engagement with contemporary issues. I thus read such early American novels as Charles Brockden Brown's Arthur Mervyn, Hannah Foster's The Coquette and The Boarding School, Judith Sargent Murray's Story of Margaretta, Rebecca Rush's Kelroy, Sarah Wood's Dorval; or The Speculator, the anonymous Amelia; or, The Faithless Briton, and others alongside and against these other modes of discourse. This juxtaposition of genres reveals the intricate workings of discourses of power and authority about the individual, institutions, and the nation. Placed within such a cultural context, the prevalence of the epistolary mode and the repetition of such tropes as self-discipline, seduction, female madness, and economic speculation no longer signal imitativeness or a failure of artistry--charges frequently leveled at early American fiction--but rather suggest loci of cultural anxiety and energy. In charting fiction's cultural connections, I address the construction of gender roles, particularly how fiction legitimates, regulates, or represses what Charles Brockden Brown calls the \"intricate relations\" of sex and property. Fiction provided a forum for articulating cultural anxieties and exploring how various kinds of desire--particularly sexual and economic desires--might be muted, mediated, or controlled in order for the Republic to function smoothly. In the world of the novel, both sexual and economic relations come to serve as litmus tests for the propensity of the new Americans toward virtue and vice or, in a broader sense, toward communal benefits versus self-gratification. Fiction thus formed a significant link in the nexus of public discourse tending toward the formation of a national culture, and fiction itself became an important vehicle for participation in public discourse, particularly for female writers.