Liberty of the Imagination

Edward Cahill is Associate Professor of English at Fordham University.

Introduction Chapter 1. Ingenious Disquisition and Controversy Chapter 2. Poetry, Pleasure, and the Revolution Chapter 3. The Beautiful and Sublime Objects of Landscape Writing Chapter 4. Taste, Ratification, and Republican Form in The Federalist Chapter 5. The Novel, the Imagination, and Charles Brockden Brown's Aesthetic State Chapter 6. Federalist Criticism and the Power of Genius Conclusion List of Abbreviations Notes Bibliography Index Acknowledgments

"Canvassing the multiple ways in which discussions of the imagination and aesthetics shaped the geography of political and cultural production in the early U.S. republic, Cahill's book is at present the conclusive study of the importance of debate about aesthetic positions during the pre-Jacksonian period." (American Historical Review) "A compelling and far-reaching study that scrutinizes the transatlantic influence of aesthetic theory during the eighteenth century. Liberty of the Imagination is clearly the work of capacious intellect deeply engaged with British and American aesthetic politics." (Early American Literature) "A masterful account of the transatlantic flow of ideas and the way in which American writers of the Revolutionary and early national periods used those aesthetic arguments to imagine a nation." (Leonard Tennenhouse, Duke University) "An original and highly significant contribution to the study of early American literature, politics, and aesthetics. Edward Cahill makes a compelling and ground-breaking case that the discourse of aesthetics played an important role in late eighteenth-century U.S. cultural production and politics." (Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, Northeastern University)