Republican mother, Republican daughter: a critical reassessment of Hannah Webster Foster

This dissertation provides a critical reassessment of the historical and modern conceptions of early American novelist Hannah Webster Foster as part of a larger disciplinary move toward recovering authors, primarily women, whose work has been lost or neglected by scholars. Although Foster is a fairly prominent writer from this early national period, remarkably little is known about her life due to her desire for anonymity and personal privacy. As a result, much of Foster’s legacy has been constructed through a combination of problematic assumptions related to the author’s class and gender as well as biases by those attempting to refashion the author according to contemporary approaches. While these concerns are examined in this study, much of this dissertation hinges on new opportunities for Foster scholarship by offering historical evidence related to and annotation of a recovered text to present a fuller perspective of Foster than has previously been available. Through an analysis of this recovered text, this dissertation challenges modern perceptions of Foster to show that Foster may best be understood through the ways she consistently models republicanism through her writings.