This introductory survey of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century American literature will explore the roles that print culture played in the consolidation of American identity. While some American writers embraced the disinterested pursuit of knowledge, seeking to create a literary sphere divorced from politics and personality, others aimed to develop a distinctive national literature marked both by its style and its subjects. Both of these projects, although seemingly at odds with each other, involved responding either implicitly or explicitly to works by British writers, which dominated the literary market in the American colonies and early republic. As we read a variety of texts—including autobiographies by Benjamin Franklin, Samson Occom, and Olaudah Equiano, novels by Charles Brockden Brown and Susanna Rowson, and poetry by Philip Freneau and Lydia Sigourney-- we will question how eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century American writers understood the relationships between literary and political representation in their formative nation.