Writing the Rebellion: Loyalists and the Literature of Politics in British America

While crucial readings of Revolutionary-era texts have accustomed us to look for certain rhetorical and discursive features-the performative creation of national identity, the productive ambiguities of language, the Jeremiad, eloquence directed toward a disinterested public sphere-Gould contends that the literary register of Loyalist writing is "not commensurate with the criti- cal rubrics that have traditionally shaped literary and cultural studies of the American Revolution" (5). [...]through its method as well as its claims, it illuminates the ways writing, aesthetics, and politics are routed through one another, not reducible to one another.