Thomas Paine and the Literature of Revolution

Edward Larkin is Assistant Professor of English and American Studies at the University of Richmond. He received a B.A. from Harvard University in 1990 and a Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1998. He was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to lecture on American studies and literature at Tallinn Pedagogical University in Tallinn, Estonia, during the 2004-05 academic year. Larkin is the editor of a new edition of Common Sense (Broadview Press, 2004) and has published numerous articles in Early American Literature and Arizona Quarterly.

"Edward Larkin's impressive study of Paine's literary achievement takes such moments of rhetorical complexity seriously. This book is really the first to assess Paine's place in eighteenth-century print culture by analyzing a broad range of his writings...Larkin offers historical context and careful rhetorical analysis of well-known writings such as Common Sense, The Rights of Man (1791), and The Age of Reason (1794–95), as well as the less canonical Letter to the Abbé Raynal (1782) and The Letter to George Washington (1796)....The most impressive features of this book are Larkin's willingness to creatively reconceptualize genre and his ability to find important figurative and thematic relations within the Paine canon." -William and Mary Quarterly

• Acknowledgements; Introduction; 1. Inventing an American public: the Pennsylvania Magazine and revolutionary American political discourse; 2. 'Could the Wolf Bleat Like the Lamb': Paine's critique of the early American public sphere; 3. Writing revolutionary history; 4. The science of revolution: technological metaphors and scientific methodology in Rights of Man and The Age of Reason; 5. 'Strong Friends and Violent Enemies': the historical construction of Thomas Paine through the nineteenth century; Epilogue: Paine and nineteenth-century American literary history; Works cited; Index.