ABSTRACT
This chapter examines Royall Tyler’s critique of a national self-image based on transatlantic empiricism and a literature of sentiment in a text that has often been described as one of the first American novels, The Algerine Captive (1797). The chapter resists understanding the book as a novel, instead using the structure of the oriental-observer tale, and in particular its allegorical foundations, as a means to uncover the more complex threads of a truly remarkable text. The quixotic hero of Tyler’s narrative finds himself captivated rather than freed by the discourse of difference supposed to distinguish the U.S. as demonstrably rational and virtuous, in contrast to the slave-trading and decadent pirates of an Islamic North Africa. When happenstance carries him off to the Maghreb, the main character confronts in the Algerian a strangely disturbing mirror-image of the American citizen, one the nation will seek to refute in its first international war on “terror.” While the narrative ends with a call for unity among its American readers, Tyler’s conclusions on America’s confrontation with the East betray deep reservations about the course of imperialism upon which the nation has become set.
