Literary Federalism in the Age of Jefferson: Joseph Dennie and the Port Folio, 1801-1811 (review)

Abstract

In his Poetry and Ideology in Revolutionary Connecticut (1990), William C. Dowling shrewdly analyzed the relevance of the Augustan poets and satirists to the Connecticut Wits in the era of the Revolution and early republic as they explored the dimensions of a republic imagined in both classical literature and British eighteenth-century country ideology. He continues this inquiry here as he argues that Joseph Dennie and the journal that he edited from 1801 until his death in 1812 sustained [End Page 288] a last defense of classical republican values that ultimately projected a vision of the republic of letters as a refuge from the vulgar crassness of liberal, democratic America. In doing so, Dowling asserts, Dennie initiated a tradition of literary estrangement and alienation that extended from Washington Irving in the nineteenth century to Henry James and Henry Adams in the twentieth.