Americomania and the French Revolution Debate in Britain, 1789-1802

Wil Verhoeven is Chair of the American Studies Department and Professor of American Culture and Cultural Theory at the University of Groningen, and is Visiting Scholar in the American Studies Department at Brown University, Rhode Island. He is the author of Gilbert Imlay: Citizen of the World (2008), and the editor of Revolutionary Histories: Transatlantic Cultural Nationalism, 1775–1815 (2002), Epistolary Histories: Letters, Fiction, Culture (with Amanda Gilroy, 2000) and Revolutions and Watersheds: Transatlantic Dialogues, 1775–1815 (with Beth Dolan, 1999). He previously served as the Associate Dean for Education in the School of Humanities at the University of Groningen. He was the inaugural Charles H. Watts II Professor in the History of the Book and Historical Bibliography, an endowed visiting professorship at the John Carter Brown Library and Department of English, Brown University (2002–3).

'Wil Verhoeven makes a strong and original argument, that the idea of 'America' played a central, neglected role in Britain's debate on the French Revolution in the 1790s. Despite the loss of the colonies in the American Revolution, America continued to loom large in the British national imaginary. Verhoeven's readings of familiar and obscure texts are consistently rewarding. His analyses of the new world degeneracy thesis of Buffon et al.; the 'progressive agrarianism' of Crevecoeur, Jefferson, and Imlay; and the Jacobin novel are fresh and insightful; and his rehabilitation of the anti-Jacobin novel brings to the fore a neglected but 'historically significant body of social critique'. No previous writer has put these texts into conversation, and the interpretative results are striking. The debate over the French Revolution will never look quite the same.' Peter S. Onuf, University of Virginia

• Introduction: utopianism in practice: the American front of the French Revolution in Britain, 1789–1802; 1. 'The war of systems': print culture and the institutionalization of the political divide in the 1790s; 2. 'Cultivators of the earth': the American crisis and the emergence of the freehold farmer, 1763–83; 3. 'Rabies Agri': or, wilderness for sale; 4. 'The calculated rise of the American empire': the radicalization of American utopianism; 5. 'The mania of emigration': new philosophers in the wilderness; 6. 'The precious pearl of liberty': from Newgate Prison to Ohiopiomingo; 7. 'Come to these Arcadian regions where there is room for millions': politics for the people; 8. 'Look before you leap': the demonization of Jacobin America; 9. 'Parrying the enemy with their own weapons': dystopianism and the popular discourse of fear; Postscript. 'Mania reformation': the demise of transatlantic utopianism.