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- Publisher
- University of North Carolina Press
- Copyright
- Copyright © The University of North Carolina Press.
- ISSN
- 1534-147X
Abstract
<p>Abstract:</p><p>This article analyzes an obscure early American author and activist, John Lithgow, and argues that his 1802 work <i>Equality—a Political Romance</i> deserves our special attention as a groundbreaking piece of writing about economic inequality and the democratic limits of republicanism at the core of the US national project. Specifically, <i>Equality</i> represents a singular development of utopian fiction responding to the political and economic exigencies of its historical moment, and in the process Lith gow inaugurates a variant of the genre—the American anticapitalist romance—that challenges our literary taxonomies, both in terms of utopianism and the literature of the early Republic. It is, finally, the rise of finance capitalism and the protracted de pression of the early national era that conditions John Lithgows serious exploration of anticapitalist ideas and experiment in utopian literature.</p>
Journal
Early American Literature – University of North Carolina Press
Published: Feb 8, 2019