Scott Reznick specializes in nineteenth-century American literature and is particularly
interested in the intersections between literature, political philosophy, and cultural
history. His work has appeared in Early American Literature; ESQ: A Journal of Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture; Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory; and American Political Thought. His first book, The Vision of Principles: Political Liberalism and the Rise of the American Literary
Romantic Tradition (under contract with Oxford University Press), re-frames the political dimensions
of U.S. literature by exploring how the advent of Romanticism in the United States
was fundamentally intertwined with U.S. writers’ deep-seated concerns about the widespread
moral disagreement over the very nature of democracy. Engaging with writers ranging
from Charles Brockden Brown, Robert Montgomery Bird, and James Fenimore Cooper to
Harriet Beecher Stowe, Frederick Douglass, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Vision of Principles demonstrates how U.S. authors, drawing on and interrogating the Romantic imagination
in the face of widespread conflict and strife, purposefully contributed to the tradition
of political liberalism as they sought to understand the nature of moral belief and
how individuals beholden to a number of different and divergent convictions might
nevertheless share a political society.
The Vision of Principles: Political Liberalism and the Rise of the American Literary
Romantic Tradition (under contract with Oxford University Press)
“Hawthorne, History, and Politics: A Reassessment,” Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture and Theory 78.1 (Spring 2022): 105–132. doi: https://doi.org/10.1353/arq.2022.0001
“‘The Sense of Liberty’: Rethinking Liberalism and Sentimentality in Harriet Beecher
Stowe's Antislavery Novels,” ESQ: A Journal of Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture 65.4 (2019), 602–641.
“‘Government and Manners’: Cosmopolitanism and the ‘Spirit’ of Liberal Democracy in
The Federalist and Charles Brockden Brown’s Ormond,” Early American Literature 54.1 (2019), 135–161.
“On Liberty and Union: Moral Imagination and Its Limits in Daniel Webster’s Seventh
of March Speech,” American Political Thought (Summer 2017) 6.3, 371–395