UC Berkeley

In the early United States, literary culture was inextricably enmeshed with electoral politics. This dissertation explores the influence of the character sketch on that politicized literary culture, in which literary magazines held strong partisan affiliations, novelists moonlit as campaign biographers, and elected officials aspired to literary fame. The character sketch was a popular eighteenth-century genre whose depictions of individuals and social types generated aesthetic debates about how, exactly, written “strokes” and “outlines” could most clearly distill a character’s essence, as well as how a set of characters could collectively represent the polity as a whole. Constituent Characters traces how the character sketch was adopted by and adapted within early American campaign materials and shows that the aesthetic discourse surrounding the character sketch permeated how Americans discussed and imagined electoral representation from the Constitutional Debates through the 1840s. In doing so, the project reveals the surprisingly literary history of how Americans thought through questions like, What size legislature best represents the people? and What distinguished legitimate from illegitimate electoral district boundaries? It also points to the need for both scholars and writers to attend to how political and literary representation evolved together in the United States through an iterative process in which writers and readers continually renegotiated which character types the polity would collectively recognize, as well as the aesthetic terms on which it would do so.