On Felons and Fallacies: Edgar Huntly

Taking as a point of departure Paul Giles’s recent proposition of an antipodean America whereby America and Australia entered in the late eighteenth century into a triangulated relationship with Britain (as the old colony and the new vis-à-vis their imperial forebear), this chapter posits Edgar Huntly as a novel that is highly aware of the expansion of the business of empire building occurring in the 1780s. Most significantly for the emerging field of antipodean or trans-Pacific American studies, the chapter argues not only that Charles Brockden Brown’s foregrounding of violence between indigenous and settler communities contests the doctrine of terra nullius (uninhabited land) on which Australia was founded but also that his representation of Arthur Wiatte and Clithero Edny as Irish convicts equally stages a critique of transportation.