Writing the Rebellion: Loyalists and the Literature of Politics in British America by Philip Gould (review)

Abstract

Writing Rebellion: Loyalists and Literature of Politics in British America PHILIP GOULD Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013 240 pp. History, know too well, is written by winners. Why, then, have largely neglected to examine crucial period in literary history from perspective of losers? Writing Rebellion, Philip Gould provocatively asks how literary history of changes when take Loyalists out of their marginal role as Hollywood bad guys and resituate them in history of political writing in British America. To do so, of course, is to imagine an Anglo-American literary history that need lead to an America know or with which can identify. Midway through book, Gould poses one of its central questions in terms of traumatic disruption of identity: In world where traditional social relations ... have been riven by patriotic politics, how can tell difference now between brothers and strangers? Who are we' that 'we' are talking about? (107-08). Who indeed? This question resonates only for eighteenth-century writers that Gould treats but also for scholars of literature, for whom slippage between scholarly we and we has always been fraught. As Gould argues in his introduction, national narrative of 'development' of literature and its reliance on the as crucial period of political that laid groundwork for future literary and cultural independence have persisted despite our best intentions (6). Even as scholars have criticized the methods and assumptions of nationalist literary historiography, they have tended to patriotic discourse as writing--and thus to read Loyalists as alien, or to read them at all (7). Writing Rebellion marks break from circular logic whereby centrality of Patriot canon and obscurity of Loyalist writing serve familiar narratives, whether celebratory or critical. While crucial readings of Revolutionary-era texts have accustomed us to look for certain rhetorical and discursive features--the performative creation of identity, productive ambiguities of language, Jeremiad, eloquence directed toward disinterested public sphere--Gould contends that literary register of Loyalist writing is not commensurate with critical rubrics that have traditionally shaped literary and cultural studies of Revolution (5). As this assessment suggests, recovering Loyalist archive and expanding our critical purview, impressive accomplishments in themselves, are only groundwork for Gould's ambitious project. He aims to produce a new image of complex political and cultural dynamics shaping British Americans' renegotiations of their fraught and often damaged relation to 'English' (8). His work thus takes its place in an admirable body of recent scholarship, thoroughly situated in Atlantic world, that addresses intersections of transatlantic literary and cultural production and circulation; interleaving of imperial, colonial, and identities; and complex interplay between political discourse, book history, and aesthetics--work exemplified by though certainly limited to critics like David Shields, Edward Larkin, Trish Loughran, Leonard Tennenhouse, Elisa Tamarkin, Eric Slauter, and Edward Cahill. this context, it is hardly surprising that narratives begin to creak under pressure. More surprisingly, perhaps, Gould shows how thoroughly political debate in British America was enmeshed in literary and aesthetic concerns. Writing Rebellion argues that our habitual identification of Loyalists as British and Patriots as American is mistaken for two reasons. First, Patriots and Loyalists alike routed their claims through British identity and British literary culture; difference between them was not who embraced English culture but how they did so (8). …