Willing Obedience: Citizens, Soldiers, and the Progress of Consent in America, 1776-1898 - Hardcover

by Elizabeth D. Samet (Author)

This book highlights obedience as an American cultural motif by examining the ways in which citizens understand and dramatize the struggle between autonomy and allegiance.

Front Jacket

This book highlights obedience as an American cultural motif by examining the ways in which citizens understand and dramatize the struggle between autonomy and allegiance. Willing Obedience tells the story of Americans who worked out the simultaneous demands of liberty and obedience in fiction, military memoir, and political writing from the Revolution through the nineteenth century. In contrast to the European model of a subject's blind obedience to a monarch, Americans imagined an allegiance that preserved autonomy even as they consented to the constraints of a new republic. In particular, the book considers the case of the soldier, whose surprisingly complex relationship to authority is in fact representative of the situation of all citizens in a republic.

Back Jacket

A valuable read for anyone interested in the American way of war.--NYMAS Review
"This is a highly interesting and original book, which approaches familiar texts of late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century US literature from a refreshingly new perspective." --Christopher Looby, University of California, Los Angeles

Author Biography

Elizabeth D. Samet is Associate Professor of English at the United States Military Academy at West Point.