Master Plots : Race and the Founding of an American Literature, 1787-1845

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.

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.

Master Plots is an intelligent and thoughtful study of the racial aspects of identity raised by formative American writers like Royall Tyler, Charles Brockden Brown, James Fenimore Cooper, Edgar Allan Poe, and Frederick Douglass. Addressing issues such as the alien and naturalization laws, and the formation of a new nation in response to issues such as slavery and the Native American, it will appeal to scholars of American literature, American studies, and history, and should be a recommended book for graduate courses in the field.
—Shirley Samuels, Cornell University