ABSTRACT

The overall dominant function of American war literature written during the war is of course of a propagandistic nature. The appeal to the agency of the reader is central to the way war is depicted in American literature published during the Revolutionary War. War is presented as a scenario that victimizes Americans, taking away their capacity to act, but this victimization serves as the legitimization to recognize the necessity of resistance as a moral duty of each individual. The main threat to intentionality in war appears to be the presence of death on the battlefield. The plays of Hugh Henry Brackenridge as well as the poetry of Philip Freneau honor self-sacrifice by justifying the cost of war and rationalizing its outcome as congruent with American intentions. On a philosophical level, the world that a lot of novels about the War depict is characterized by a libertarian absence of a determinist structure.