Selected by Choice Magazine as an Outstanding Academic Title
While it is well known that American writers of the early national
period were preoccupied with differentiating their work from European
models, Jared Gardner argues that the national literature of the United
States was equally motivated by the desire to differentiate white
Americans from blacks and Indians. Early American writers were drawn to
fantasies of an "American race," and an American literature came to be
defined not only by its desire for cultural uniqueness but also by its
defense of racial purity. Gardner follows the shifts in American
narrative's engagement with race, from Royall Tyler's Algerine Captive
through the novels of Brockden Brown and Cooper, to Poe's tales and
Douglass's autobiographies, narratives that differently sought to
rewrite the intersections of racial and national identity the first
generation had plotted.
The larger story Master Plots describes is how the racial language of
"slavery" and "savagery" helped nationalist writers plot a unique
identity for the new nation and the cost this "master plot" exacted when
the empty rhetoric of one generation confronted the historical facts of
slavery and Native American Removal in the next. The question of what it
meant to be an American had lost none of its severity and the desire for
an answer none of its urgency. As early nationalist writers wrestled
with the question, they proved how hard a question it is to answer and
how great are the dangers in scripting its answers too easily.