Living Too Long: Republican Time in American Literature

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How do you nurture democracy in a republic? Today, as republics around the world are straining under the pressures of authoritarianism, this question becomes almost overwhelmingly urgent. In helping to draw the blueprints for United States republicanism, Thomas Jefferson gave his answer in temporal terms: the U.S. would remain democratic as long as each generation was given power to “repair” the Constitution to suit their era, but also the obligation of handing on that document, with the entire republic, in a peaceful and timely manner to the next generation. This pattern of generational succession, which Jefferson believed would prevent any one generation from permanently stamping their likeness on the country, became essential to nineteenth-century Americans’ socio-political outlook: to be a truly democratic republic, they believed, required living in this new temporal order, which has yet to be identified by scholarship and which I am calling “republican time.” The goal of my research project, executed under the co-supervision of Hélène Quanquin and Hélène Cottet (University of Lille, France), is to investigate the relationship between republican time and the workings of democracy in nineteenth-century America. I will accomplish this goal through a program of close reading of American literature, informed by theories of political science, history, race, and gender and sexuality.