Literary Federalism in the Age of Jefferson: Joseph Dennie and the Port Folio, 1801-1812 - Hardcover

Dowling, William C.

9781570032431: Literary Federalism in the Age of Jefferson: Joseph Dennie and the Port Folio, 1801-1812

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1570032432 ISBN 13: 9781570032431

Publisher: University of South Carolina Press, 1999

The Port Folio magazine, America's first major journal of literary and political opinion, was edited by Joseph Dennie between 1801 and 1811. This new study argues that as The Port Folio mounted a last spirited defense of classical republican values against "American jacobinism, " the struggle between its Federalist writers and the forces of Jeffersonian ideology gave rise to an important tradition in American writing. "The triumphing of Jefferson's part will be but short, " Dennie optimistically predicted i 1801. "Men will wake from the dreams of apathy, and the darkness of delusion." By the end of 1807, however, Dennie and the Port Folio writers had come to realize that they were on the losing side of history and that the triumph of Jeffersonian ideology would be total and permanent. Literary Federalism then originates as a tradition, argues William C. Dowling, in the attempt of Dennie and The Port Folio to provide a sanctuary for classical republican values within a separate world of the literary imagination, a mode of writing that might serve as a permanent refuge from the degraded conditions of American social existence.

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About the Author:

William C. Dowling is University Distinguished Professor of English and American Literature at Rutgers University and the 2012 recipient of the Robert Maynard Hutchins Award for his contributions to the cause of integrity in intercollegiate athletics. Of the ten books he has published, the most recent include Oliver Wendell Holmes in Paris: Medicine, Theology, and the Autocrat of the Breakfast Table, Literary Federalism in the Age of Jefferson, and The Senses of the Text: Intensional Semantics and Literary Theory. He has also written widely on college sports in such publications as The Chronicle of Higher Education and Academic Questions, and about challenges to the system of scholarly communication in the Journal of Scholarly Publishing.

Review:

Literary Federalism in the Age of Jefferson is a significant contribution to the study of early nineteenth-century American history and literature. It is a bold and powerful analysis of the counter-world to Jeffersonianism. The author develops a fascinating analysis of the positions staked out by The Port Folio, treated here as a journal capable of creating its own world. -- Joyce Appleby, University of California, Los Angeles

Professor William C. Dowling's Literary Federalism in the Age of Jefferson is a fascinating study in its own right and also a significant contribution to the re-evaluation now in progress of Jefferson's position in American and world history. -- Conor Cruise O'Brien, author of The Long Affair: Thomas Jefferson and the French Revolution

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