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A very popular rogue’s autobiography, alongside Franklin’s, and thus to see that from the outset of the American national experiment there were writers who saw that the American Way left rows of casualties as well as a few celebrated successes.
Such a move from New England to the Chesapeake (or to the middle colonies, the original seat of American pluralism), or from religious to liberal discourse will bear much fruit- indeed, already is starting to in, for example, Robert Micklus’ heroic three-volume edition of Dr. Alexander Hamilton’s History of the Ancient and Honorable Tuesday Club of Annapolis (1990). This work should do for our field what the publication of Edward Taylor’s poetry did a half-century ago- force scholars to consider wholly new achievements and genres, for Hamilton’s closest peers in literature, Micklus argue, were none other than Sterne and Fielding. And the Tuesday Club is but the tip of the iceberg for anyone interested in eighteenth-century American literature and society, for such club culture, in which literature never intended for publication circulated in manuscript among the initiates, forms an important part of our literary history, and speaks as well to the rise of “sociability” in the colonies.
Then too, David Shields’s Oracles of Empire (1990), a major treatment of eighteenth-century Anglo-American verse on the themes of commerce and empire, reveals much about the place of literature in societies obsessed with trade. Already Ph.D. students are following his lead, studying, for example, the “Virginia Wits” centered on Williamsburg in the middle and late eighteenth century (most of whose writing also remains in manuscript). These Cheaspeake counterparts to the Connecticut Wits are particularly important because of their notions of the relationship of state or region to nation contrast with those of the better known New Englanders; and after all, as Greene reminds us
See Daniel E. Williams, “in Defense of Self: Author and Authority in the Memoirs of Stephen Burroughs,” Early American Literature, 25 (1990), 96-122.
Dr. Alexander Hamilton, The History of the Ancient and Honorable Tuesday Club, ed. Robert Micklus, 3 vols. (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1990), and Robert Micklus, The Comic Genius of Dr. Alexander Hamilton (Knoxville: Univ. of Tennessee Press, 1990), pp. 142-44.
I refer to the ongoing work of Daphne O’Brien, a doctoral candidate in English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, on “The Virginia Wits: Poets and Poetry in Williamsburg from 1750-1780.”