The year 2007 marks the two-hundredth anniversary since Joel Barlow, an American poet and diplomat, first published his controversial and lengthy poem, The Columbiad. Grandiose in its ambition, Barlow framed the poem as an epic for the New World, a nationalist primer to teach republican citizens the history of the relatively new nation culminating in the American Revolution and the promise of a future utopia stimulated by the United States' republican ideas and institutions.
Unfortunately, history has not been kind to Barlow's work. Literary critics have long dismissed it for its obscure...

The revisions of the French Revolution by three prominent eighteenth- century writers are focused on in this book. The implication in the OtraditionO these writers rebelled against raises fundamental questions about the representations of rebels and Romantics as well as our canonical readings of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century texts.

Dealing with Thomas Paine's Common Sense (1776), John Trumbull's M'Fingal (1776-82), Philip Freneau's "The British-Prison Ship" (1781), J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur's Letters from an American Farmer (1782), and Washington Irving's "Rip Van Winkle" (1819-20), Steven Blakemore breaks new ground in assessing the strategies of subversion and intertextuality used during the American Revolution. Blakemore also crystallizes the historical contexts that link these works together - contexts that have been missed or overlooked by critics and scholars. The five works additionally illuminate issues...