This study establishes a framework for the study of episodic form and an analysis of its role in the literary culture of the early United States. I argue that between the constitutional consolidation and the first decade of the nineteenth century, the explosion of episodic writing was keyed to three central problems of national formation. The conceptualization of these problems depended upon an articulation of the relationship between parts and wholes, a task for which episodic form was especially well suited. First, in the realm of politics, a stark division between ruling elites and semi-participant masses compromised the legitimacy of representational government; second, the newly robust market, with its emergent forms of privilege and exclusion, strained the traditional structure of social relationships; and, finally, the social and political transformations announced by the American and French revolutions spurred anxious attention to the nature of historical change, where concentration on either episodic events or structural dynamics formed the two poles of contemporary explanation. These dilemmas of politics, social discord, and historiography found expression in an American literary culture of the episode. While it is true that the eighteenth-century British novel modeled episodic narrative, and the picaresque established a centuries-long tradition of episodic prose, I argue that it is not the novelty of the form but rather its new cultural uses that are important in the early republic; and, in turn, these new uses affect the form.

Growing out of a strong tradition of literary criticism focused on the interconnection of genre and history, this study departs from its forebears by taking the microstructure of the episode as its object. It traces historical lines across the period's key prose genres: political essay (The Federalist ), autobiographical memoir (Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography and the Life of John Fitch), and novel (including Susanna Rowson's Trials of the Human Heart, Charles Brockden Brown's Ormond, and the anonymous History of Constantius and Pulchera). This cross-generic approach is particularly suited to the field of literary production at the turn of the nineteenth century, in which generic boundaries are well marked but also porous, and in which it is precisely the cross-generic prevalence of episodic structure that invites analysis and explanation. Through a deeply historicized formalism, this dissertation writes early U.S. literary history not as the easy victory of grand nationalist ambitions, but rather as a series of social struggles expressed through writers' recurring engagement with incompletely integrated forms.