ABSTRACT
Introduction In the early 1790s, French, English, and American radicals converged in revolutionary Paris, where they propounded transatlantic agrarian republicanism in texts that would affect Romantic literary sensibilities for decades to come. As Marilyn Butler has put it, they conspired in a “collective literary enterprise,” derived from their various national traditions but unified in a broader agenda of “republicanism, agrarian socialism and anarchy” (1-2). These were years of crisis around the Atlantic; mass unemployment, vagrancy, and destitution that arose from enclosures, food shortages, epidemics, and bondage were only intensified by the oppressive measures that reactionary governments imposed to check them. From Ireland to Haiti, from the Vendée to Western Pennsylvania, insurrections were widespread, as was brutal governmental repression in the name of national security.
