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In the early years of the study of American literature, critics neglected the period that corresponds to the founding years of the nation because the literature of that time was considered insufficiently American, too derivative of European models. The period from 1776 to 1820 in American literary history, often called the era of the Early Republic, has receivedrenewed attention from critics in recent years, with good reason. During the early Republican period, the boundaries between fiction and nonfictional narratives were porous, and genre mixing in prose was common. Poetry in the neoclassical mode, exemplified by Alexander Pope, remained popular throughout the era. Poetry was well suited to the literary magazines, which were one of the most readily accessible outlets for American writers, and the neoclassical model of poetry allowed poets to adapt the genre to almost any topic, political, moral, or social, that they wished to address. Domestically produced drama grew somewhat more slowly, but a tradition of patriotic plays, often featuring events of the Revolution, emerged in the early national period, suggesting the importance of a communal creation of an idealized history of the origins of the nation.

Dominant Genres and Literary Forms

During the war years, the literary works that most often captured the public’s attention were texts that dealt with confrontation at hand: texts that laid out political arguments in support of the war or made plans and predictions, optimistic or pessimistic, about the future of the new nation; texts that exhorted others to join the war effort or to support it. Of this literature, only a small portion is read today. Thomas Paine’s Common Sense （1776）, which laid out the philosophical and practical arguments for war, and the Declaration of Independence, which officially declared the intention of the united colonies to break away from England, are two texts that have remained essential reading as forceful expressions of the philosophical and cultural changes wrought by the Revolution. The Articles of Confederation, the governing document of the United States from 1777 to 1788, and the Constitution that replaced it are more frequently read by students of political science than literature, but given the serious debates that surrounded them, they are worth the attention of anyone interested in the culture of the early Republic. In the postwar period, plentiful writing about political matters continued to attract a broad readership, but writers were also free to apply renewed attention to more traditional literary genres, the most prominent of these being poetry, nonfiction prose, and fiction.

Poets in the early Republican era understood poetry to have a didactic purpose, and they saw the poet as having a social responsibility. In accordance with the neoclassical tradition that was dominant in England in the eighteenth century, American poetry in this era relied on definite verse forms with regular rhyme and rhythm, using poetic diction, and making frequent allusions to classical writers, myth, and the Bible. Throughout this period, poetry was a highlyregarded genre, published frequently in newspapers and literary magazines.

The one most familiar in literary criticism has been called the Connecticut Wits （earlier the Hartford Wits or the “wicked wits”）. This group of young men, mostly graduates of Yale, included Joel Barlow, Timothy Dwight IV, David Humphreys, John Trumbull, Lemuel Hopkins, Richard Alsop, and Theodore Dwight. While these poets produced works of their own, they also composed and published some collaboratively written poetry, most notably The Anarchiad （1786–1787）, a highly topical commentary on contemporary political disorder that reflected the group’s generally Federalist tendencies. More recently, scholars have drawn attention to the work of a network of women writers in the Delaware Valley, encompassing Philadelphia and its Pennsylvania and New Jersey environs; significant portions of these women’s work can be found in Milcah Martha Moore’s Book （1997） and Only for the Eye of a Friend: The Poems of Annis Boudinot Stockton （1995）.

Nonfiction: Autobiography, Letters, Essays

Nonfiction in a variety of forms was very popular throughout the period. Biographies and autobiographies of famous people and less-famous people whose lives were considered exemplary in some way were popular, as were their letters. Life writings and letters were frequently printed both in book form and in shorter forms in magazines. Essays on topics of social, philosophical, and historical interest were common in magazines. In part, such writings were seen as constituting a more serious alternative to fiction reading, but frequently nonfictional texts contained many of the same features that made fiction attractive.

Perhaps the most notable change in American literature in the period following the Revolution was the development of an American tradition of the novel. Before the late 1780s, Americans were certainly reading novels they had imported from abroad, but they were not writing novels. Beginning in the late 1780s and through the 1790s, however, the novel did flourish. As Cathy N. Davidson demonstrated in one of the crucial books that began a resurgence of academic attention to this period （ Revolution and the Word , 1986）, the hundred or so novels written and published in the United States during the early Republican era can be grouped generally into three categories: the sentimental, the picaresque, and the Gothic.

The term “sentimental” as used to group certain novels of eighteenth-century literature only partly corresponds to the way in which that word is used today in common speech. While it is true that sentimental novels focused on emotion as the key force behind human action,they also generally featured a certain set of ideas about emotions, a particular view of human psychology that was popular in the era. Sentimental fiction in the early Republican era often, but not always, featured stories of seduction or attempted seduction of innocent young women. When successful, seduction usually ended in pregnancy and, frequently, the death during or shortly after childbirth of the seduced woman. Tales of mismatched and potentially incestuous love affairs were also a common staple of sentimental fiction. Rowson was the most prolific of the early American sentimental novelists, producing not only a sequel to the popular Charlotte Temple but also several other sentimental novels in a long career that spanned into the 1820s.

Picaresque fiction offered a different worldview. While picaresque fiction sometimes referred to sentimentality and sensibility, such references were generally mocking. Though American picaresque writers likely modeled their works primarily on English writers, the picaresque tradition is indebted to Miguel de Cervantes’s novel Don Quixote （1605）. A major feature of the picaresque novel is an episodic plot; that is, the novel strings together a series of events or adventures that do not necessarily build to a single culminating climax. The picaresque novel’s ability to encompass a wide range of social classes and a large number of characters and situations made it particularly appropriate to the unsettled political, cultural, and social world of the early Republic. The best-selling （and anonymous） History of Constantius and Pulchera （1794） is a picaresque novel focused on ill-fated lovers, demonstrating that not all novels about romantic love had to be cast in the sentimental mode. Other American picaresques featured foreign settings, such as S. S. B. K. Wood’s Ferdinand and Elmira: A Russian Story （1804） or Royall Tyler’s The Algerine Captive （1797）.

In America, Gothic novelists sometimes set their novels in Europe in order to have a good reason to include such gothic trappings as a castle; in other cases, they created fantastic scenarios to locate these settings in the United States. The most interesting Gothic novels in American literature found American settings （the wilderness or the city） that could serve the same function as the European castle. In addition, the gothic often featured fractured or dysfunctional families; indeed, some theorists of gothic consider the family to be its primary topic. Jay Fliegelman has argued in Prodigals and Pilgrims: The American Revolution Against Patriarchal Authority （1982）, that one important cultural trend in early America was a revolution against the patriarchal family, so the popularity of gothic may reflect that cultural preoccupation as well. American Gothic took a variety of forms. Perhaps the most populargothic novel by an American was Isaac Mitchell’s The Asylum; or Alonzo and Melissa （1811）, which was reprinted throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth.