Modern Chivalry ’s Colonialism

Abstract

ABSTRACT: Hugh Henry Brackenridge’s seven-volume novel Modern Chivalry comments on and satirizes the people and politics of the early Republic. In the narrative, Indigenous characters are largely absent, yet the novel insists on the idea of their former presence. Imagined Indigenous absence in the text serves to help frontier settlers seek integration into a national whole and avoid feeling subjugated by Philadelphia’s political elites. A close analysis of the novel reveals a western perspective that aimed to colonize without being colonized. Modern Chivalry ’s publication history echoes the West’s hopes to integrate into the expansionist nation, and specific deletions from later editions of the text further erase even the idea of an Indigenous presence on the frontier. Brackenridge’s novel and its publication and editorial histories thus work in concert to effect settler colonialism and a nationally palatable literature.