Although the impact of works such as Common Sense and The Rights of Man has led historians to study Thomas Paine's role in the American Revolution and political scientists to evaluate his contributions to political theory, scholars have tacitly agreed not to treat him as a literary figure. This book not only redresses this omission, but also demonstrates that Paine's literary sensibility is particularly evident in the very texts that confirmed his importance as a theorist. And yet, because of this association with the 'masses', Paine is often dismissed as a mere propagandist. Thomas Paine and the Literature of Revolution recovers Paine as a transatlantic popular intellectual who would translate the major political theories of the eighteenth century into a language that was accessible and appealing to ordinary citizens on both sides of the Atlantic.
Although the impact of works such as Common Sense and The Rights of Man has led historians to study Thomas Paine's role in the American Revolution and political scientists to evaluate his contributions to political theory, scholars have tacitly agreed not to treat him as a literary figure. This book not only redresses this omission, but also demonstrates that Paine's literary sensibility is particularly evident in the very texts that confirmed his importance as a theorist. And yet, because of this association with the 'masses', Paine is often dismissed as a mere propagandist. Thomas Paine and the Literature of Revolution recovers Paine as a transatlantic popular intellectual who would translate the major political theories of the eighteenth century into a language that was accessible and appealing to ordinary citizens on both sides of the Atlantic.
Early American artists and political thinkers wrestled with the challenges of forming a cohesive, if not coherent, culture and political structure to organize the young republic and its diverse peoples. The American School of Empire shows how this American idea of empire emerged through a dialogue with British forms of empire, becoming foundational to how the US organized its government and providing early Americans with the framework for thinking about the relations between states and the disparate peoples and cultures that defined them. Edward Larkin places special emphasis on the forms of the novel and history painting, which were crucial vehicles for the articulation of the American vision of empire in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
This book includes both the original German version and, for the first time, an English translation of Carl Wilhelm Frölich’s important essay of 1792, which Georg Foster praised as «one of the rarest
When Common Sense was published in January 1776, it sold, by some estimates, a stunning 150,000 copies in the colonies. What exactly made this pamphlet so appealing? This is a question not only about
