It was only after serving as a chaplain in the American Revolution, playing an important role in the Whiskey Rebellion, and serving (often controversially) on the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, that Hugh Henry Brackenridge composed his great comic epic. Published in installments over the twenty-eight-year period beginning with Washington's presidency ending with that of Madison, this irreverent and ribald novel, relating the misadventures of Captain Farrago and his sidekick, Teague O'Regan, leaves no major ethnic, racial, religious, or political issue of the period unscathed.
Ed White is Associate Professor of English, University of Florida.
Modern Chivalry is a singularly rich and undeniably important American novel, and Ed White's magnificent new edition does it superb credit. It is at once a bold literary experiment and an incisive social document; its formal adventurousness is matched by its searching political commentary. White's meticulous editing and annotation, and his superb Introduction and interpretive apparatus, make this an edition that will be greatly useful in the classroom as well as magnificently informative and challenging for scholars. Most important, it returns to print in beautiful form a deeply fascinating and wonderfully confounding early American literary masterpiece, one of the truly great American books. Henry Adams aptly called it 'a satire on democracy written by a democrat,' celebrated its 'genuine and original qualities,' and said it was 'more thoroughly American than any book yet published.' Modern Chivalry 's capacious humor, epic ambition, and trenchant political satire make it not only intellectually fascinating but also wickedly enjoyable.--Christopher Looby, Department of English, UCLA
One of the most compelling arguments for reading Modern Chivarly is that it brings a situational immediacy to historical figures, issues, and decisions for twenty-first-century students that they might not otherwise have available to them. This new print edition makes an important era of American history and literature available to the reading public. . . . [A] major addition to early American studies.--Janice McIntire-Strasburg, Department of English and Writing Program Director, Saint Louis University, in Eighteenth-Century Fiction
