Dreaming revolution

Dreaming Revolution usefully employs current critical theory to address how the European novel of class revolt was transformed into the American novel of imperial expansion. Bradfield shows that early American romantic fiction - including works by William Godwin, Charles Brockden Brown, James Fenimore Cooper, and Edgar Allan Poe - can and should be considered as part of a genre too often limited to the Nineteenth-century European novel. Beginning with Godwin's Caleb Williams, Bradfield describes the ways in which revolution legitimates itself as a means of establishing Political consensus. For European revolutionaries like Godwin or Rousseau, the tyranny of the king must be replaced by the more indisputable authority of human reason. In other words, democratic revolution makes people free to investigate the same truths and arrive at the same democratic conclusions. In the American novel, however, the Enlightenment's idealized pursuit of abstract truth becomes restructured as a pursuit of abstract space. Instead of revealing knowledge, Americans explore further territories, manifest destiny, limitless regions of the yet-to-be-colonized and the still-to-be-known. In a spirited discus