Republican Fictions

Abstract

This chapter examines three roughly contemporaneous but very different fictions—Hugh Henry Brackenridge's Modern Chivalry (1792–1815), Royall Tyler's The Algerine Captive (1797), and Charles Brockden Brown's Wieland (1798)—that sought to intervene in distinct controversies in republican political culture: debates about the norms of political discourse, about national unity, and about educating the citizenry, respectively. In spite of their divergent political commitments, party affiliations, and regional perspectives, these writers shared a belief in the political utility of fiction's distinctive modes of supposition. Working within a framework of value—civic virtue—that they shared with fiction's critics, Brackenridge, Tyler, and Brown developed highly instrumental conceptions of fiction's purpose largely unfamiliar to twenty-first-century readers: they embraced fictionality not only out of an investment in aesthetic pleasure and imaginative play for their own sake, but also as a means of training readers in the modes of speculative thought necessary for the ongoing project of shaping the republic. In order to suggest fictionality's value for republican politics, however, these writers had to first resist the prevailing association of fiction with privacy and demonstrate that fictionality does not entail a disconnection from civic life. Taken as a group, their fictions complicate ascendant narratives of fictionality's development, which have linked fictionality's “rise” to its depoliticization.