The Bavarian Illuminati, the Early American Novel, and Histories of the Public Sphere

Abstract

HE past decade and a half of scholarship on the culture of the early American Republic has included an extraordinary amount of attention to the nature of the public sphere, a fixation that not only illuminates current academic and popular cultures but also was shared by many citizens-particularly political and intellectual leadersof the new nation and of the eighteenth-century Atlantic world.1 This self-consciousness about the dynamics of publicity coexisted with another preoccupation, one mapped exhaustively by critics in the 196os