Conspiracy and Romance
Studies in Brockden Brown, Cooper, Hawthorne, and Melville

Robert Levine has examined the American romance in a historical context. His book offers a fresh reading of the genre, establishing its importance to American culture between the founding of the republic and the Civil war.

Robert S. Levine (Author)

9780521366540, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 29 September 1989

316 pages
22.8 x 15.2 x 1.9 cm, 0.58 kg

"Levine provides useful information on the Illuminati scare and the counter-subversive discourse of the 1790's....Levine's persuasive analysis provides an example of how historical scholarship can significantly change one's reading of an individual text while also allowing that text to inform one's perception of its original audience." Scott Peeples, The Eighteenth Century

Robert Levine has examined the American romance in a historical context. His book offers a fresh reading of the genre, establishing its importance to American culture between the founding of the republic and the Civil war. With convincing historical and literary detail, Levine shows that anxieties about various subversive elements - French revolutionaries, secret societies, Catholic immigrants, African slaves - are central to the fictional worlds of Brockden Brown, Cooper, Hawthorne and Melville. Ormond, The Bravo, The Blithedale Romance, and Benito Cereno are persuasively explicated by Levine to demonstrate that the romance addressed many of the same conflicts and ideals that gave rise to the American republic. Americans conceived of America as a romance, and their romances dramatised the historical conditions of the culture, The fear that conspiracies would subvert the order and integrity of the new nation were recurrent and widespread; Levine makes us see that these fears informed the works of our major romance writers from the turn of the century until the Civil War.

Acknowledgements
Introduction
1. 'The defencelessness of her condition': Villainy and Vulnerability in Charles Brockden Brown's Ormond
2. 'Souless Corporation
: Oligarchy and the Countersubversive Presence in James Fenimore Cooper's The Bravo
3. 'A confusion of popish and protestant emblems': Insiders and Outsiders in Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance
4. 'Follow you Leader': Captains and Mutineers in Herman Melville's Benito Cereno
Epilogue
Notes
Index.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900 [DSBF]