Coquetry and the Transamerican Foundations of US Literary Sentimentalism

Abstract

Chapter 1 recontextualizes early US sentimental literature through the coquette, a figure who connects Hannah Webster Foster’s The Coquette (1797), Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland (1798), and Leonora Sansay’s novel of the Haitian Revolution, Secret History (1808). The chapter argues that the historical connections between Sansay’s and Foster’s heroines demonstrate how novels such as The Coquette obscure the transamerican connections underlying their “found[ing] on fact.” Secret History instead uses its Saint-Dominguan setting to rewrite paradigmatic US understandings of the coquette, rescuing the figure from both gothic horrors and the condemnations suffered by Brown’s and Foster’s heroines. Pairing Foster’s, Brown’s, and Sansay’s novels illustrates how early US sentimentalism was shaped by the Americas’—not just early America’s—literary, economic, political, and military flows.