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Introduction

Style and the Cisatlantic

We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.

—T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets

Original Imitations

Crèvecoeur’s epistolary regional narrative, Letters from an American Farmer (1782), is sometimes credited with the first embodiment of a distinctly American voice in its naïve narrator, Farmer James. Yet the work’s true founding gesture, ontologically prior to the invention of this narrative voice, is to imagine the offstage voice of James’s urbane British correspondent, whose letters are never represented, but against whose “refined style” the farmer repeatedly defines his own distinctly non-British voice: “However incorrect my style, however inexpert my methods, however trifling my observations may hereafter appear to you, assure yourself they will all be the genuine dictates of my mind…. I am neither a philosopher, politician, divine, or naturalist, but a simple farmer.”¹ What is hiding in plain sight here is simply this: Crèvecoeur needs British English in order to delineate his farmer’s more immediate, spontaneous, authentic, and American form of expression. This “British” voice is a rhetorical straw man, to be sure. But it is far more than that, for without this absent term of contrast, the “American” voice literally cannot speak. The simple fact that the latter is defined in a string of negative identifications—neither a this, nor a that, nor the other—further underscores the point. For the farmer’s style can only really be described in privative terms, as incorrect and inexpert. The logic so perfectly encapsulated here can be generalized across late eighteenth-century Anglo-American letters, where literary Americanness was quite literally being invented as a set of characteristics, not just incidentally distinct from Britishness but explicitly constructed in a differential relation to it, and in that sense, generated directly out of the British norms it claimed to leave behind.

During the 1780s and 1790s, anglophone writers in the United States first began to claim that their writing incarnated “American” qualities. It was, at least in part, a kind of marketing slogan aimed at capturing a larger share of an increasingly competitive transatlantic literary market. Working in popular literary forms and modes already well established in Europe, these writers could offer recognizable and readable literary commodities; yet they also got to insist that they were creating something new and different. In the most basic terms, that newness had to do with their location on this side of the Atlantic Ocean. The condition of being “cis-Atlantic,” to use the awkward-sounding neologism Thomas Jefferson coined in 1782,² made it possible to claim that U.S. writing was infused with some distinct quality of “Americanness.” The only problem was, before authors could offer such a thing to readers, they would have to figure out what on earth it was. During the colonial period, Anglo-American authors had been far more interested in demonstrating their ability to write within a British tradition of belles lettres than in boasting of any distinctive characteristics associated with American subjectivity, geography, or social conditions.³ In fact, prior to around 1780, had such a phrase as “American literature” been used at all, it would most likely have been taken to refer to works by British authors with New World settings, like John Dryden’s The Indian Emperour (1665), Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko (1688), or Charlotte Lennox’s Life of Harriot Stuart (1750)—early examples of what Paul Giles has recently termed “the American tradition in English literature.”⁴ Between 1780 and 1800, however, authors in the new United States began to formulate their own concept of a properly American literature. Yet that new concept preceded its referent, not just in the way usually asserted by our literary histories—that the call would have to wait a half century or more for its fulfillment—but in the more fundamental sense that, at the moment the idea was born, no one had really considered yet what it would mean to write like an American, what literature with an American origin would look like, nor what literary characteristics the elusive quality of Americanness could be expected to generate. Literature, American Style returns to this moment, decades before the romantic nationalism of James Fenimore Cooper, the transcendentalism of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, or the iconoclastic poetics of Walt Whitman, when a fantasy about the unique characteristics of U.S. literature and culture first took shape—and when, for particular reasons, that notion came to be yoked to literary style.

To tell this story is to confront head-on the foundational question of American literary studies: by what logic do we carve out a particular slice of anglophone literary production and then proceed to treat it as a distinct national tradition with special characteristics? For most of the twentieth century, it was an essentially unspoken, and hence undefended premise that, as Lawrence Buell has recently put it, “anyone who cares about U.S. literature and culture has a natural interest in trying to understand what is distinctive about it.”⁵ But since the 1980s—the decade at the end of which William Spengemann famously held up a “mirror for Americanists” in which they might glimpse the distorted reflection of their own uninterrogated assumptions⁶—the critical cathexis of “American” originality has justifiably come under attack for its tendency toward exceptionalism and its willful blindness to transnational cultural dynamics, both hemispheric and global.⁷ As will be abundantly clear in the pages that follow, it is no nostalgia for an older exceptionalist common sense that leads me to pose the question of national style. On the contrary, my aim is to investigate the eighteenth-century literary origins of the logic that made twentieth-century critical exceptionalism possible in the first place. For, some two centuries before it became the site of heated polemics in the academy, the question of national distinctiveness was first posed as a rather concrete problem of literary production and marketing. My project here, then, is more historical and genealogical than it is polemical; my question is not whether it is true or false that U.S. literature has distinct and identifiable qualities, but when that notional aspiration first arose, why it did, and most important, how it came to be lodged in style. Far from wanting to make a new fetish of national originality under the sign of “style,” what this book emphasizes is really the opposite: the very idea of American literary novelty was not something new under the sun but rather a particular spin on cultural developments that originate elsewhere and have a long European literary history. In fact, early U.S. literary producers gravitated to the realm of style precisely because it provided a way of grappling with that uncomfortable problem of cultural indebtedness.

* * *

The early anglophone writers of the United States made their case for national distinctiveness in rather different terms than their more storied mid-nineteenth-century counterparts or the literary critics who later codified that “great tradition” as a national fetish. Those differences make the post-Revolutionary bid for national originality a fascinating object of study, even if we believe scholars have dwelled for far too long on the comparable claims and desires of later generations. For even as early U.S. authors began to insist that they were generating a new and distinctly cisatlantic literary tradition, they set out to do so by self-consciously imitating transatlantic forms and then adapting them to a new environment. “Originally the writer designed to imitate, in the several parts, as many British Poets,” wrote Timothy Dwight in the introduction to his seven-part American georgic, Greenfield Hill (1794).⁸ In a similar spirit, Charles Brockden Brown’s 1798 advertisement for his first novel rested its claim for “originality” in gothic fiction squarely on the author’s “employ[ment] of the European models”; yet by “adapt[ing] his fiction to all that is genuine and peculiar in the scenes before him,” he promised to offer readers a literary performance “unexampled” in America in the form of a “tale that may rival the performances of this kind which have lately issued from the English press.”⁹ If it seems peculiar that the assertion of national originality could walk hand in hand with the acknowledgment of foreign emulation, this double gesture was entirely typical of the period. In fact, as Michael North argues in a fascinating recent study, Novelty: A History of the New, the concept of innovation throughout most of its Western history consistently presumed that it was less an act of “radical creation” out of nothing and “more a matter of adjustment and recombination” of “preexisting elements.”¹⁰ In accordance with this general principle, early U.S. literature presented itself not as a sui generis tradition, but as a set of original imitations.

To modern readers, though, the very notion of attempting to arrive at originality through imitation might appear to be a plain contradiction in terms. In the Anglo-American context in particular, this is largely because “imitation” came to connote something so different to later generations of artists and critics. It is well documented that for those writers whom we now associate with the mid-nineteenth-century “American Renaissance,” literary imitation represented a kind of cultural malady. This was the problem to which Herman Melville addressed himself in the pseudonymous 1850 essay, “Hawthorne and His Mosses, By a Virginian Spending July in Vermont.” Speaking through a literary-nationalist persona, Melville launched a spirited Emerson-like attack on cultural imitation and, along with it, made a call for a more vigorous kind of literary nationalism under the banner of Nathaniel Hawthorne: “But it is better to fail in originality, than to succeed in imitation…. And we want no American Goldsmiths; nay, we want no American Miltons. It were the vilest thing you could say of a true American author, that he were an American Tompkins. Call him an American, and have done; for you can not say a nobler thing about him.”¹¹ As the callouts to Milton and Goldsmith suggest, this whole business of an American so-and-so seemed to Melville to belong more properly to the colonial past; to compare a nineteenth-century American author to a seventeenth- or eighteenth-century English one is to turn the hands of the cultural clock back to a prenational state before the United States could boast any models of its own. In actuality, Melville’s “Virginian” asserts, Hawthorne was nothing less than a true American original and the living antidote to the disease of transatlantic imitation. Such claims started to crystallize around the figure of Hawthorne between Melville’s 1850 essay and Henry James’s 1879 assessment of “the celebrated American romancer” as “the most valuable example of the American genius” in his biography of Hawthorne.¹² As James and others were fond of pointing out, Hawthorne’s birthdate alone (he was born on the Fourth of July) seemed to predestine him to play a part in this crucial cultural-literary phase of American independence. By the 1950s, critics such as Richard Chase elevated this commonplace image of Hawthorne into a full-scale literary-historical argument about the American “romance” as a native species of prose fiction crucially distinct from those of Europe, with Hawthorne as its first truly effective practitioner.¹³ In a sense, Hawthorne himself was always more of a pawn in this literary-nationalist game than one of its players. His own discussion of the romance in the preface to The House of the Seven Gables (1851), for example, staged only a generic distinction—not a national one. By calling his long fictions “Romances,” Hawthorne explained, he only hoped to “claim a certain latitude … which he would not have felt himself entitled to assume, had he professed to be writing a Novel.” If the novel must bind itself to the real and assert a certain kind of mimetic fidelity, the romance has more freedom to roam: “While, as a work of art, it must rigidly subject itself to laws, and while it sins unpardonably, so far as it may swerve aside from the truth of the human heart,” the romance still “has fairly a right to present that truth, under circumstances, to a great extent, of the writer’s own choosing or creation.”¹⁴ Even so, while Hawthorne’s use of this generic distinction thus made no explicit bid for national originality, his language of legal rights and responsibilities, along with the very notion of a proprietary literary claim, do suggest what the argument could become in other hands: American literature is not merely different but unique; it is structured differently, obeys different internal rules, and has a different kind of epistemological responsibility to the referent and to the world of objects.

Perhaps no nineteenth-century author voiced the proposition more boldly than Walt Whitman in his 1855 preface to Leaves of Grass: “The Americans of all nations at any time upon the earth have probably the fullest poetical nature…. In the history of the earth hitherto the largest and most stirring appear tame and orderly to their ampler largeness and stir.”¹⁵ These more jingoistic expressions of American literary nationalism have received a great deal of scholarly attention, whether in the spirit of celebration or rebuke, in part because they invite associations with American exceptionalism in its explicitly political forms—that fateful fantasy of a uniquely structured society, endowed with peculiar rights and responsibilities on the international world stage, while also being exempt from rules held to be universally binding for all other nations.¹⁶ Even Hawthorne’s relatively modest invocations of romantic literary license could be recruited on behalf of literary exceptionalism. From his experiments in fictional form, the story goes, arose a prose tradition that possessed a unique power to conjure what Richard Poirier called a “world elsewhere”—a kind of heterotopia called forth by, and dwelling in, literary language itself.¹⁷

My purpose in taking this brief forward peek is simply to point out that, to readers familiar with later, more extravagant expressions of literary uniqueness, the scene of a nascent U.S. literary culture actually boasting of local versions of British types tends to seem rather quaint by contrast. Where is the declaration of radical alterity? Where is D. H. Lawrence’s heterotopic version of American literature, peopled by what he called “strangers, incomprehensible beings … creatures of an other-world”?¹⁸ In fact, the late eighteenth-century works under consideration here made a different kind of claim. This earlier generation of Anglo-American writers sought not to produce new literary forms but to put a local stamp on borrowed ones.¹⁹ The later attack on their imitativeness (Melville’s “better to fail in originality, than to succeed in imitation”) is evidence, not that it took until the generation of Hawthorne and Whitman for American writers finally to succeed in being original where their predecessors had failed, but rather a sign that a new notion of “originality” came to wage war on an older one, redefining the concept of “imitation” in the process. The literary historian’s challenge, then, is to apprehend the earlier formation in its own terms, rather than understanding it merely as an uncompleted cultural gesture—that is, without orienting it at the outset toward its more famous teloi. The first order of business is to recover that older sense of literary originality, according to which one could, without derision or triviality, without inconsistency or absurdity, actually celebrate an American Milton or an American Goldsmith. To do analytical justice to that literary logic of adoption and adaptation—to see it as anything other than a failure to become a later idea of literary art—will require us, first of all, to shift our frame of reference to pre-Romantic notions of artistic originality, where literary genius could consist in the exemplary performance of an existing form.²⁰

Transplantation, translation, transfer, conversation, correspondence, commerce—these are the terms in which early U.S. authors conceived of transatlantic literary relations. The concept anchoring their literary nationalism was not absolute alterity but rather, as Leonard Tennenhouse has put it, “repetition, with a difference.”²¹ Yet they still boasted not just of radical novelty, but of national originality by virtue of what Charles Brockden Brown called their “unexampled” quality. What, then, might these writers have to teach us by violating the Emersonian dictum, “Insist on yourself; never imitate”?²² To begin to answer this question, we must become far more interested in the eighteenth-century origins of a notional “American literature” than in its nineteenth-century destinations.

Inventing the Cisatlantic

I have called the idea of literary Americanness a late eighteenth-century marketing scheme, but it was also a recognizable cultural project very much of its historical moment—one particular expression of a post-Revolutionary imperative, after having established a new sovereign body politic, to define the “American” as a new figure and endow it with a distinct, even unique national character. One of the most revealing aspects of this project was its unabashed, undisguised arbitrariness; rather than some organic substance, “American character” clearly named a lack or absence that would have to be remedied by a deliberate cultural exertion. This is not merely some retrospective poststructuralist conceit. As Anglo-American statesmen began to insist at the time, and social and cultural historians closer to our own time have emphasized in turn, the Revolution was not the end of a process of national self-definition but its merest beginning. To put it in the simplest terms, the problem was this: “Americanness” did not yet exist as a positive entity with concrete attributes, but for a host of political, social, cultural, and economic reasons, Anglo-Americans suddenly found it increasingly necessary to speak as if it did. Yet unless they were willing to embrace an indigenous definition modeled on the continent’s native inhabitants—a cultural road generally not taken during this period, despite certain symbolic gestures in that direction—they had but one alternative. To produce the American as a category in its own right, they would have to begin by defining it in opposition to the Briton. That simple logic of negation cut a path through a thicket of cultural self-definition. Through it, the cultural space of the “cisatlantic” would henceforth be constituted in a complex differential relation to the transatlantic cultural spaces against which it seemed to distinguish itself.

“People in America have always been shouting about the things they are not,” D. H. Lawrence long ago observed in Studies in Classic American Literature.²³ Terence Martin, lending some rigor and specificity to this formulation, has investigated the “rhetoric of negation” that served for a long time as the predominant mode for American acts of self-definition.²⁴ Late eighteenth-century Americans, Martin observes, display a particular “tendency (perhaps a need) to negate Europe in order to identify and possess America,” thus producing a vast canon of “negative catalogues” and “statements mark[ing] the difference between an old world and a new by enumerating what is missing in the new.”²⁵ Paradoxically, the “form and impulse” of this kind of negative cultural definition itself had roots in the European cultures that were being negated; moreover, as I will indicate in the pages that follow, some of the actual content of these privative definitions of Americanness had observable European counterparts and equivalences. Yet in this kind of cultural myth making, even borrowed gestures could be turned back against the lender in an insistent act of disidentification. Out of this cultural dynamic was born what Martin calls “the powerful dialectic that fostered a sense of American identity” during the Early Republic: “From the Old World came a conception of the New, from the New a conception of the Old by means of which Americans could announce what they were not … and thereby proclaim their superiority.”²⁶ My subject here is not this larger cultural process as such, but the literary problem that was its particularly concrete homologue.

According to some Anglo-American thinkers at the end of the eighteenth century, the solution to the vast and abstract problem of cultivating a new national identity might begin with language itself. “Every engine should be employed to render the people of this country national,” Noah Webster insisted in Dissertations on the English Language (1789). “However they may boast of Independence, and the freedom of their government, yet their opinions are not sufficiently independent; an astonishing respect for the arts and literature of their parent country, and a blind imitation of its manners, are still prevalent among the Americans.”²⁷ As we can immediately infer from this oft-quoted description, Webster did not believe that the solution could be a political one; after all, the problem had not yet taken care of itself in the course of achieving political independence, nor even a bold act of federal reconstitution. There was now a new national “government,” to be sure, but not yet a national culture; there was a new “country,” but not yet a nation; this country had “people” in it whom he can call “the Americans,” but Americans were not yet a people. This peculiar deficiency could only be remedied, Webster was convinced, in the realm of language. “A national language is a band of national union.”²⁸ U.S. national character would eventually arise from the invention of a language which was English, but no longer British. For reasons I will detail in Chapter 1, Webster went to work on a technical level to purge American spellings of the inconsistencies and polyglossic baggage British English had acquired from long proximity to other European tongues. A completely rationalized and simplified mode of spelling, he wagered, would immediately pay off at the level of cultural reproduction; children of all ranks would learn the language faster and more expertly, as would immigrants with different mother tongues. In this way, a purified English language would bring a principle of uniformity to bear on the diverse contact zone that was the social reality of eighteenth-century North America, binding together a host of languages and regional and class dialects into a single new linguistic community. This would make it difficult for another European language to compete with English as the language of America. It would also keep African Americans and Native Americans at the cultural margins by defining America as English in an ethnolinguistic sense. The “American tongue,” Webster asserted, would have to be based on English, for that language is “the inheritance which the Americans have received from their British parents”; yet the language would define itself as American by virtue of its departures from British English. In order to perfect the language while making it distinctly “ours,” then, Webster set out—as he put it rather strikingly—to “make a difference”²⁹ between British and American English. Certainly, we should understand this phrase quite literally: the desired national distinction would have to be made, that is, manufactured through the technical means of orthographic reform. But we would also do well to hear in Webster’s word “difference” the mathematical denotation of that term, namely, the result of a subtraction. For this was a bid for linguistic novelty that proceeded, in effect, by taking something away. Webster would define American English precisely by negating or abjecting those aspects of British English which he regarded as corrupt or irrational. What was left over after this deductive operation would constitute a “new” language practice.

Meanwhile, as linguists and lexicographers were trying to puzzle out what it was going to mean to speak English on this side of the Atlantic, authors of imaginative literature were busy working out the analogous literary problem that centrally concerns me here: how their works could exist within the larger body of anglophone writing and yet still claim to lie apart from it as a distinct national tradition. The linguistic solution I have just summarized in fact pre-traced the exact path the literary solution would take, while also suggesting why literature could be a productive medium for working out fundamental problems of cultural identity. Anglo-American literature, like its language, was essentially and inescapably derivative. Yet it too would insist on defining itself not as a repetition of past practices, but by virtue of what it is not: not aboriginally American because it is English in origin, but at the same time not British because it is American in practice. After all, Noah Webster did not propose, as some of his contemporaries are said to have done, that the North American republic adopt a truly American language such as Iroquois or Algonquian in order to provide itself with the necessary “national band”; rather, he began with Johnson’s English and then made certain local modifications to it in order to recast the language in a putatively American form. Just so, Anglo-American literary artists did not, say, begin to write trickster tales as a way of asserting the indigeneity of their tradition; nor did they embrace African American literary forms like the slave narrative as the (arguably far stronger) basis of a culturally distinct tradition. Instead, these authors began with the established forms of English letters and then set out to alter those forms in ways that would render them uniquely “American.”³⁰ By analogy to the Judeo-Christian creation myth, we might say that the creation of U.S. culture was less like that of the first man and more like that of the first woman; “Americanness,” that is, was less a miraculous ex nihilo creation than a generation of radical difference through an act of subdivision and derivation.

* * *

The exception, as the saying goes, is constituted by the rule; just so, “American literature” began to self-generate by first defining a British literary norm from which it might then “except” itself. We can call it a literary version of what Amanda Emerson, drawing on the social theory of Georg Simmel, has termed “negative affiliation.”³¹ That is, the very idea of the unique singularity of our literature, or of its distinct national character, first originated with the authors’ self-conscious negation of certain characteristics of British literary culture rather than having grown organically from any distinctive features of the American scene. Thus, for example, if British letters were supposed to be hypercultivated and artificial, Crèvecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer refashioned their American counterpart as blessedly rude and therefore as manifestly authentic (Chapter 2). If the British culture of the aesthetic was an art of the polished and the beautiful, Charles Brockden Brown’s Edgar Huntly rewrote the gothic romance as an aesthetic of the difficult that mirrored the rough sublimity of America’s geography (Chapter 3). And if British courtship practices and their fictional expressions relied on artifice, disguise, and hypocrisy, seduction novels like Susanna Rowson’s Charlotte Temple and Hannah Webster Foster’s The Coquette argued, American expression was artless, sincere, and plainspoken (Chapter 4). In many if not all instances of this kind of national self-definition, the so-called British norm is little more than a stereotype serving the obvious function of enabling Anglo-American differentiation by contrast. More than that, as I have already noted above, this whole logic of negative or subtractive originality, along with some of its characteristic cultural contents, were often themselves direct borrowings from specifically British rhetorics of negation. Even as U.S. writers asserted their distance from British literary culture, they repeated structurally identical gestures of differentiation with which that British culture had set itself against (for example) a French literary culture that it had cast in comparable terms as extravagant and hypercultivated, over-polished and insincere. For all of its claims to novelty, then, this kind of national differentiation did not invent any “new” cultural values. Far from it. In fact, it usually proceeded by grasping onto a cultural opposition already active in British culture, adopting one of its poles as the axis of a supposedly American characteristic, and consigning the other side of the binary to a residual British cultural stance. This was precisely what Noah Webster did, for example, when he embraced certain phonetic spellings that had already been put forward by certain British lexicographers (including color for “colour” or public for “publick”), and then extrapolated from them an “American” mode of spelling.

In spite of its rhetorical tenor, then, the American negation of British literary culture was not really a cultural “disaffiliation”; it would be more accurate to theorize it as an inverted form of affiliation.³² My belief is that this basic reorientation immediately reframes the old question of what makes American literature American. If the set of positive literary features we later came to associate with an American aesthetic (characteristics like naïveté, vernacularity, a demotic style, and so on) were not the origin, but the product, of a process of negative definition, then our literary-historical objective must shift accordingly: instead of setting out to discover the “American” characteristics that generated a literature, we would look for the moment when a U.S. nationalist cultural attitude first defined an abjected norm, and, in that very same process, defined itself as the exception. What we thus discover is that the claim of cisatlantic literary originality itself has an irreducibly transatlantic source. “To be sure of what they were,” as Terence Martin puts it, Americans “converted a European tradition to their own use and proclaimed (with developing conviction) what they were not.”³³ The case I consider in Chapter 2 furnishes a particularly concrete example, for this was precisely what Crèvecoeur did when he used a (fictional) learned British correspondent as a transatlantic foil for that of his “simple [American] farmer” (Letters, 49). So, too, by having Farmer James describe his own writing almost exclusively through grammatical privatives (“However incorrect my style, however inexpert my methods” [49]), Crèvecoeur signaled that the style of his “simple farmer” had to be negatively derived, as it were, from a putatively British norm. New stereotypes of “American” identity, language, and literature began to emerge at this historical moment, some of which may still have cultural traction for us; yet we have systematically, perhaps willfully, forgotten the gesture of negative definition which first gave rise to them.

The Anglophobia Thesis

As I hope is already becoming clear, I mean by all this something quite different from the familiar idea of a “cultural declaration of independence” from Britain which was supposed to complete the act of political separation in literary or artistic terms.³⁴ Literary history has made a cliche of the independence trope, but, slogans aside, post-Revolutionary literary culture was shaped more profoundly by the realities of transatlantic exchange than by the desire for national isolation.³⁵ If we feel compelled for some reason to nominate a founding political document as a symbol of this literary culture, why not, at least as a thought experiment, consider alternative candidates? Take the Treaty of Paris, for example.³⁶ After all, nearly all of what we have canonized as U.S. literature is not just “post-Revolutionary,” but “post–Treaty of Paris” as well—less sonorous, but not less true. The treaty, which in 1783 marked the formal commencement of international relations between the United States and Britain as sovereign states and trade partners, used a different sort of performative language than its famous declaring cousin: in it the United States of America “treat[ed] with”³⁷ the British crown to recover “the good Correspondence and Friendship which they mutually wish to restore, and to establish such a beneficial and satisfactory intercourse, between the two countries upon the ground of reciprocal advantages and mutual convenience.”³⁸ The “perpetual Peace and Harmony” thus restored—whose language anticipated the cosmopolitan vision of Immanuel Kant’s “Toward Perpetual Peace” essay a decade later—was to be political, cultural, and not least, economic, reconnecting the circuits of communication and commerce “unhappily interrupted” by the Revolution, rejoining a formerly severed transatlantic tie.³⁹ A declaration of interdependence: how different would American literary history look with that as its governing statement?⁴⁰

The question is rhetorical, but it should help to explain a peculiar feature of Literature, American Style: my object of study is the aspiration toward national originality, but my methodology and angle of approach are entwined with a recent wave of scholarship that has radically questioned that very idea. Clearly, an alternative paradigm has been emerging in early American studies, one which signals a general change in the status of the nation as an organizing concept.⁴¹ But I want to describe it in rather more specific terms than that of a “transnational turn” in order to focus more narrowly on its revision of our assumptions about how anglophone Americans apprehended their relationship to Britain.⁴² To put a fine point on it, I will term the older common sense the “Anglophobia thesis,” for it proceeded from the premise that U.S. culture was born out an intense desire to cut itself off from Britain. For the sake of parallelism, we can call the revisionary paradigm the “Anglophilia thesis,” partly to indicate its kinship with the “Anglicization” argument in political and social history, but also in a nod to Elisa Tamarkin’s 2008 book, Anglophilia: Deference, Devotion, and Antebellum America. At issue is whether, as Cold War–era cultural histories tended to assume, the new nation immediately began to distance itself from all that is British, or whether, as scholars have recently begun to suggest, Britain still remained a model for cultural definition in the Revolutionary and early national periods and beyond. Rather than capitulating to the commonsense assumption that the Revolution was the accomplishment of a long-standing desire to be separate from Britain—and that the most important cultural products were those that first produced that revolutionary ideology and then sustained the new nation-state—recent scholarship has instead emphasized the complex exchange of political ideas, literary forms, and ideas about group identity and cultural reproduction that began long before, and continued long after, formal political independence. We can see the new emphasis rather clearly in social and political histories of the period. According to the strain of historiography associated with John Murrin, T. H. Breen, Jack Greene, and others, Anglo-Americans were increasingly insistent throughout the colonial period not on increasing or even maintaining their social distance from Britain, but in fact on replicating its institutions and its forms of consumption.⁴³ Murrin’s term for this process, Anglicization, best expresses the paradoxical nature of U.S. national identity as it emerged over the course of the eighteenth century: to the extent that Anglo-Americans did experience a growing sense of political cohesion during this period, “Britain had been the major focus of unity and the engine of change.”⁴⁴ On this account, the Revolution itself was “the culminating moment in the process of Anglicization”⁴⁵ rather than an inevitable becoming-American of a settler culture.

Literary historians, arguing along comparable lines, have begun to refigure our understanding of transatlantic literary relations precisely by questioning the assumption “that different national governments mean different national literatures,” as Leonard Tennenhouse put it. In his 2007 book, The Importance of Feeling English: American Literature and the British Diaspora, 1750–1850, Tennenhouse gives us an entirely different explanatory model for transatlantic cultural relations at the end of the eighteenth century than the reflexive oedipal narrative according to which a new national identity was “born” and then naturally grew up to assert its maturity and independence.⁴⁶ Instead, he takes the counterintuitive line that early U.S. culture is nothing more nor less than a branch of a British diaspora, that is, an explicit attempt to reproduce the characteristic elements of English culture outside of England itself.⁴⁷ Tamarkin’s Anglophilia, published the following year, deploys a different category to do comparable work (though the fact that one of her sections is entitled “The Importance of Being English” is an immediate indication that she and Tennenhouse were independently thinking along similar lines).⁴⁸ If Tamarkin rounded out the national picture by reaccentuating a tradition of American Anglophilia central to the antebellum period, recent work by Edward Larkin and Philip Gould recovers the critical role of loyalist voices in early U.S. culture-formation.⁴⁹ Taken together, we might say, all this work tends to find something like “Anglicization” precisely where we have been trained to look for “Americanization.”⁵⁰

Now, since much of this scholarship questions the self-evidence of the nation as a category of cultural analysis, thus unseating the exceptionalist premises that dominated Cold War–era literary scholarship, it may at first seem an uncomfortable entryway into my inquiry, if not to obviate my question entirely. Yet Literature, American Style is born from the conviction that these disciplinary turns and methodological revisions provide the perfect opportunity to reconsider the old question of “our national literature” in a fresh way. To do so is not perversely to redraw the borders around U.S. literature at the very moment transatlantic, hemispheric, and global approaches are rendering them permeable and subsuming the nation into larger geocultural units.⁵¹ Rather, as I hinted at the outset, it is to return to the early national history of our academic present. In this way, my project is motivated more by questions of cultural genealogy than debates about scholarly methodology. To the extent that I engage hemispheric revisions to the literary field, for example, I do so by exposing the origin of the central mystification they redress: the moment when literary production in the U.S. first began to refer to itself as “American literature,” not only obscuring its transatlantic debts and resonances but making the nation stand synecdochically for the continent in what has become a peculiarly powerful cultural distortion. This moment inaugurated a fateful cultural process by which “U.S. literature” famously took hold of the conceptual space of “American literature” and claimed rights to it; so powerful was this appropriation that it now requires us to deploy “new” hemispheric methodologies to restore what should really have been a simple matter of denotation.⁵² But just as importantly, something of the opposite cultural formation also dates back to this same historical moment. The decades after the Revolution marked, in a sense, the original “transatlantic turn,” when just-emerging concepts of U.S. identity first did battle over the precise nature of its relation to Britishness—not as a theoretical matter of critical method, but a practical matter of cultural production and ethnic identification. My most difficult and most important task is to come up with a satisfactory account of the relationship between these strangely twinned cultural formations.

* * *

Joseph Roach has observed that stories of cultural origin proceed “along two general axes of possibility”—that they come, in effect, in two flavors. First, “the diasporic, which features migration,” and second, “the autochthonous, which claims indigenous roots deeper than memory itself.”⁵³ This distinction is related to a structural opposition often framed in anthropological work as allochthony versus autochthony. This is the opposition often implicitly at work when competing claims to political power are symbolically resolved by assigning a myth of origins to a ruler: the allochthon is the stranger-king, the ruler who has come from elsewhere and brought his exotic power with him; the autochthon is the local king with wholly indigenous roots, whose legitimacy springs from the earth itself.⁵⁴ At issue in my project is how such myths are used to tell origin stories about literature and culture, rather than to legitimate political rule, but the same conceptual possibilities are in play. Is American literature an allochthonous body of Old World learning and letters that has been transferred to the New World, or is it an autochthonous growth from American earth? From where does its prestige and vitality originate, its transatlantic origins or its cisatlantic destination? Or, to put it in terms that I will explore in the book’s coda: Which is determinative, stock or soil—varietal or terroir? One of my most surprising findings is the manner in which these seemingly incommensurable origin stories powerfully, if illogically, mingled in the late eighteenth-century invention of “American literature” and have continued to do so ever since.⁵⁵ Their strange coexistence is one of the reasons that both the nation-centered versions of our cultural history and its various transnationalist revisions will always continue to have interpretive traction. Ultimately, there is no choosing between these alternatives, simply because they are not just argumentative positions or methodological paradigms; they are aspects of a contradictory definition of U.S. national character that lie at the very historical source of that idea.

What I try to capture in this book, then, is the double logic by which an emergent U.S. literary culture at once asserted its continuities with, and its radical departures from Britishness—abjecting and incorporating it at once. The logic of negative affiliation was what enabled its first cultural producers to manage this inherent contradiction. As I have already indicated, this way of understanding the problem is intended, first and foremost, as a revision of the Anglophobia thesis that used to govern the literary history of the Revolutionary period. But at the same time, its differential logic should also sound distinct in emphasis from that of Tennenhouse’s “British diaspora” or Tamarkin’s “Anglophilia.” On the one hand, Anglo-Americans were explicitly attempting to transfer the characteristic elements of English culture elsewhere. On the other hand, however, some of the authors of this transferred culture then immediately turned around and claimed a radical originality generated by that “elsewhere.” In the terms of the botanical figure which was so often used to frame such matters of cultural transfer, a transplanted stock has sent down roots into unaccustomed earth, and that new soil has in turn begun to exert a transformative effect on the old stock. In order to tell both sides of this story, we must grasp how Anglo-American literary culture sutured the fantasy of autochthony to the reality of cultural allochthony. It did so not by claiming a kinship with actual indigenous cultures but rather by asserting that Englishness itself underwent a process of being positively transformed by the American genius loci. Neither “Anglophobia” nor “Anglophilia” can capture the full range of cultural affect involved in this logic of negative affiliation.

Literary Foreign Debt and the Order of Style

Though I have occasionally referred to American literary distinctiveness as an “idea,” my most significant argument in this book is that literary Americanness was not thought into existence as a concept so much as written into existence as style. I have already used that term several times in the pages above, but I have now to theorize it properly, to account for its particular usage in the late eighteenth century, and to explain why such a concept would have come to bear such crucial cultural weight in the context of the literary problem I am investigating. The word “style” sees a lot of use in the period (“stile” was the more typical eighteenth-century spelling), but I am interested less in tracking the occurrences of a word than analyzing the functioning of the concept, whether or not the term itself was inked to paper on a given occasion.

Style, I shall argue, was the concept that a burgeoning national literature seized on as a solution to the problem of literary foreign debt—a notion I borrow from Franco Moretti and Roberto Schwarz. Recruiting world-Systems theory in order to rethink literary relations on the model of global economy, Moretti’s “Conjectures on World Literature” (2000) argued that literary history too should recognize a world “simultaneously one, and unequal: with a core, and a periphery (and a semiperiphery) that are bound together in a relationship of growing inequality” (56). He then adapted and generalized a trope from Schwarz’s study of Brazilian literature in particular: “Foreign debt is as inevitable in Brazilian letters as in any other field.”⁵⁶ The economic metaphor is always “subterraneously at work in literary history,” writes Moretti, but what would it mean to elevate it into a fully realized theory of literature: “ ‘foreign debt’ as a complex literary feature”⁵⁷ of international literary relations? With the novel supplying the test case, Moretti arrived at “comparative morphology,” the study of how a literary form is forced to adapt as it moves from its original context into a new one, where the now “foreign form” encounters new “local materials.” Thus the importation of the novel from its Western European points of origin into India, Japan, Brazil, the Philippines, and so on turns out to provide so many models of this “compromise between foreign form and local materials,” while what we thought was “the rule of the rise of the novel (the Spanish, the French, and especially the British case)” turn out instead to be the exceptions.⁵⁸ Adaptation of a foreign form is the “law of literary evolution.”⁵⁹

While examples from and references to the United States are notably absent from “Conjectures on World Literature,” there is no question that its central dialectic of formal adoption and adaptation is an enormously productive lens for the emergence of U.S. literature. For as I have already indicated, early U.S. writing was intensely aware of itself as a set of local varieties of borrowed types, and the literary dynamics of foreign debt remained a constant presence throughout the early national period, not only in the wake of the War of 1812. From this vantage point, the fashioning of a U.S. literary culture looks less like a “rise” of a national literature and more like one of those “compromise[s] between foreign form and local materials”⁶⁰ by which Moretti characterizes the novel’s adaptation into Japan, Brazil, or the Philippines. But I am just as interested in the limits of this comparison. For in these other scenarios of literary adaptation, the adapted form immediately differs from the borrowed model in one irreducible respect: language itself. As the novel moves to Brazil or Japan, it crosses not just a geographical barrier but also a national-linguistic one; adaptation coincides with translation and is thus overdetermined by it. In the anglophone literature of the United States, however, imported British literary forms crossed an ocean but no such language boundary. With no distinct vernacular in place to mark the instant and irreducible difference of the transferred form, this emergent literature had to find some other basis for its putatively national character if it wanted to claim the existence of such a thing.

“Customs, habits, and language, as well as government, should be national,” wrote Noah Webster in 1789. “America should have her own distinct from all the world. Such is the policy of other nations and such must be our policy, before the states can either be independent or respectable.”⁶¹ Note the counterfactual mood that reigns here, as it tends to do in Webster’s writing in particular and early U.S. cultural nationalisms in general: America “should” have a national language, it “must” have one, but even after a bold act of federal reconstitution, it as yet does not. How, then, could this nation hope to bind itself to itself as a unity without even possessing its own tongue? “Nations arose from languages, and not languages from nations,” Isidore of Seville had written in his seventh-century treatise The Etymologies.⁶² Webster’s linguistic plan, insofar as it attempted to form a national language after the constitution of a national government, inverted this age-old law of the generation of languages: it proposed to make a language from a nation.⁶³ And whether Webster and his contemporaries succeeded at all in doing so remained a point of contention and mockery well into the nineteenth century. “The Americans,” Samuel Taylor Coleridge pointedly quipped in 1822, “presented the extraordinary anomaly of a people without a language.”⁶⁴

Against the background of this linguistic problem, the cultural object we call “American literature” would seem to be an even more perverse impossibility: How could a nation with a borrowed language even dare to dream of producing its own authentic tradition of letters? To use the economic metaphor again, founding a national literature in such a cultural environment was something like founding a national economy without minting a new currency. This problem made the literature of the anglophone United States a particular case but by no means a unique one, for here it was shaped by a set of cultural relations shared with all nations born from settler colonialism. As Donald Denoon and other scholars of comparative colonialism have demonstrated, the disparate cultural histories of South Africa, Australia, Argentina, and others share not only particular economic structures but also “ ‘exceptionalist’ ideologies … common to settler regimes.”⁶⁵ The remarkable irony yielded by this comparative view, put simply, is that American exceptionalism—whether in its political, economic, or cultural incarnations—is unexceptional. And yet, as this scholarship also makes clear, the cultural elites in such settler societies do tend rather insistently to represent the nation in exceptionalist terms. As Michael Denning argues, the ideological formation we know as American exceptionalism is thus best and most accurately understood as a particular local variety of what he calls “settler exceptionalism.”⁶⁶ To explain this in the simplest terms: it stands to reason that a settler nation, for which “foreign debt” is an ineluctable social fact, might insist on its cultural uniqueness and autonomy in a compensatory way. It was a way of dealing with the problem of culture endemic to the settler nation: cultural life is lived in a metropolitan language rather than in a unique vernacular. This problem deeply affects the project of a literary nationalism and determines the shape any such formation seems logically bound to take. And, in the case of the anglophone United States, at least, I believe that style was the solution to this cultural and linguistic dilemma.

* * *

“Stile” could be glossed in the eighteenth century, rather simply, as “the choice of words and the manner of arranging them.”⁶⁷ In this technical sense, style was a second-order linguistic concept, consisting not in the words themselves but in the particularity of their selection and combination. Thus, in its more generalized sense, style signified a mode of expression, a way of referring to how different speakers, orators, or writers might wield the same linguistic elements in distinct ways. This made it possible to name different poetic or prose styles as baroque, plain, pastoral, and so on. The later sumptuary or sartorial senses of the term were built upon these primary linguistic meanings (etymologically, the English word “style” is derived from the Latin “stilus,” a writing instrument),⁶⁸ thus playing on the traditional association between modes of dress and styles of address. The important point is that across the range of its usage, “style” always points to a locus of difference in repetition: one exhibits a style when one participates in a common practice but does so in a particular manner. Also significant here is that, where later usage tends to associate style with individual differences (the singular mark or “signature” of an author), during this period it more commonly referred to collective distinctions of class, occupation, region, or nation.⁶⁹ The logic of “national style” thus provided American writers at the end of the eighteenth century with exactly what they needed: a way of asserting that they borrowed literary forms but “wore” them differently: English literature, American style.

This is not to say that the concept of style itself is in any way an invention of modern settler cultures. Obviously, we can look to classical rhetorical manuals, and particularly those of Latin antiquity, for a theoretical and practical body of writing on style that remained very in circulation during the eighteenth century. As has been well documented in early American scholarship, not only were the political structures of the Roman Republic an ever-present point of comparison and contrast (both in idealizing and cautionary terms) for the new United States, but the cultural products and oratorical traditions of ancient Rome were treated as a crucial training ground for aspiring American writers and rhetoricians.⁷⁰ I would sharpen the point further: in Latin rhetorical treatises, post-Revolutionary Americans found not only practical manuals of style—their “Strunk and White,” so to speak—but also a theoretical model for the use of “style” to establish cultural uniqueness in the face of foreign influence.

When Roman rhetoricians began to deal with the Greek inheritance within their own particular sphere of activity, the question of style similarly began to take on a broader cultural denotation, rather than simply referring to a feature of individual expression. The locus classicus is Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria, published in the late first century CE. Though many sections of the work address the cultivation of style in the Roman schoolboy, citizen, and would-be orator, the most crucial discussion appears in Book VIII: “What the Greeks call φϱασίς we in Latin call elocutio or style. Style is revealed both in individual words and in groups of words. As regards the former, we must see that they are Latin, clear, elegant and well-adapted to produce the desired effect. As regards the latter, they must be correct, aptly placed and adorned with suitable figures.”⁷¹ The words must be Latin: that a fact so obvious must be stated, and recursively instantiated by distinguishing the Greek and Latin signs for “style” itself, indicates that the point is far from trivial. This question of cultural distinction is what marks the emphasis of Book VIII as distinct from Quintilian’s discussions of style earlier in the work: “I have already, in the portions of the first book dealing with the subject of grammar, said all that is necessary on the way to acquire idiomatic and correct speech. But there my remarks were restricted to the prevention of positive faults, and it is well that I should now point out that our words should have nothing provincial or foreign about them.”⁷² In other words, it is now a matter of cultivating not just a proper style but a properly Roman one. “Idiomatic and correct speech” will not be a function only of choosing the words from the reservoir of the Latin language but also, he emphasizes, of combining those chosen words in a particular way. This is why “idiomatic” and “correct” are conjoined as goals: “For you will find that there are a number of writers by no means deficient in style whose language is precious rather than idiomatic.”⁷³ An idiom (etymologically, a thing that is made one’s own) is a combination of words that, placed in certain relation to one another, have a peculiar meaning in a particular language community. One simple way of putting it is this: even if all of the component words of an idiom were identical or cognate from one language to another, the overall linguistic effect could not be simply translated by substitution of words. This notion of idiomaticity is crucial enough to Quintilian that he gives it anecdotal support in an excursive passage worth quoting at length: “As an illustration of my meaning I would remind you of the story of the old woman at Athens, who, when Theophrastus, a man of no mean eloquence, used one solitary word in an affected way, immediately said that he was a foreigner, and on being asked how she detected it, replied that his language was too Attic for Athens. Again Asinius Pollio held that Livy, for all his astounding eloquence, showed traces of the idiom of Padua. Therefore, if possible, our voice and all our words should be such as to reveal the native of this city, so that our speech may seem to be of genuine Roman origin, and not merely to have been presented with Roman citizenship.”⁷⁴ Quintilian’s use of one Greek and one Roman example conceals, in a way, that this problem is far more acute in the latter case, which is to say, to his own audience—members of a culture indelibly marked by linguistic and cultural foreign debt. For the Greeks, who recognized no prior or foreign model to which they need aspire, “correct” speech was simply that which obeyed objective laws of expression. But for Roman rhetoricians, there was an added layer of cultural exertion and aspiration, namely Latinity—being correctly Latin.

I have taken this detour through Latin rhetoric not only for the historical and institutional reason that this rhetorical tradition in general, and Quintilian’s text in particular, would have been intimately familiar to late eighteenth-century authors, readers, and politicians, but more fundamentally because the distinction between these two relationships to language seems to me to be structurally similar to the transatlantic dynamic at work in British-American cultural relations. Beginning at midcentury, standard-bearers of British English like Samuel Johnson had attempted to stabilize the English language and to encode a lexical standard. Later in the century, those British attempts would be countered by American lexicographers like Noah Webster, who set out to address its endemic inconsistencies in spelling and construction and to cultivate an American orthographic system distinct from it and capable of forming a more perfect standard of its own. We might say by analogy that Johnson’s English thus played “Greek” to Webster’s “Latin.” But the linguistic analogy immediately breaks down. For Roman rhetoricians and poets, the problem of imitatio inherently coincided with the fact of translatio. “What the Greeks call φϱασίς we in Latin call elocutio or style.”⁷⁵ That is to say, at least there were different words for the same concept; at least the idea of style was voiced by different phonemes, visualized by different graphemes. Even under such linguistic circumstances, it was difficult enough to address the problem of speaking a genuinely Roman Latin; imagine how much more difficult had the problem been that of speaking Greek as a Roman. But that, in effect, was the Anglo-American predicament as I have described it: the cultural-nationalist impulse had to be conducted within the same language as the “foreign” culture whose influence must be managed. This sociolinguistic dilemma, and the cultural problem it signals, was a far more intractable one than Quintilian had faced; nonetheless, his theory of idiomatic style cut a path for American cultural nationalism.

And this explains, finally, why style was destined to become even more crucial in the American case. I would go so far as to say that only the order of style—which is to say, the register, not of the language reservoir itself, but of the choice of words and the manner of their combination—could provide American speakers of English with the grounds for claiming a national-linguistic distinction. “American English,” if the phrase itself was not to be an absurd contradiction in terms, would have to be something capable of boasting (to paraphrase Quintilian) genuinely American origin, rather than merely English presented with U.S. citizenship. But with no “new language” in circulation to distinguish colony from metropole, the only available ground on which to claim linguistic distinctness is a new way of inhabiting the metropolitan language. Again, this rests on a conception of novelty not as ex nihilo invention, but as a distinctive selection and recombination of already existing elements. If Noah Webster performed this operation on American language by proposing a modal revision of British English—what we might call American-style English—the authors of imaginative fiction I consider here did the same for American literature by proposing to rewrite British letters as “literature, American style.” Precisely because it was modal in the same way as Webster’s orthographic solution, literary style was the only conceptual register capable of performing this sublimation of foreign language and letters into an original vernacular tradition.

Vernacular Anxiety Without a Vernacular

Literature, American Style will focus, as its title baldly enough indicates, on the nationally and historically specific ways in which these literary concerns played out in early U.S. literature, and obliges itself to describe this process in thick cultural detail. At the same time, however, it would be a problematic distortion to treat it as a singular phenomenon isolated from the long European literary history that lay behind it. At the very least, any account of the problem of national literary distinctiveness ought to begin by registering a long history of various European literatures confronting similar questions of linguistic and cultural identity, and at times generating strikingly similar discursive strategies for addressing them. That longer literary-historical vista is important, not only for the virtues of what we blandly call “context,” but for a more fundamental argumentative reason. It forces us to confront the central paradox of the U.S. insistence on cultural novelty, namely, that it not only repeats but even self-consciously emulates much earlier European arguments and cultural logics. To leave this gear out of the critical machine—to treat the idea of American originality as a self-originating discourse that could be isolated from prior or similar cultural formations—would only result in a pseudohistory of that phenomenon that in reality did little more than amplify its central assumptions and capitulate in advance to its mystifications. This is a serious danger in any scholarly treatment of the topic—the present work included.

The first fence I shall build against the exceptionalist fallacy is simply to recognize this late eighteenth-century desire for American originality as a late moment in a much longer European genealogy. Of course, early U.S. culture had particular political, demographic, and geographical matters to address; the literary nationalism some of its participants embraced was inflected by historically modern conceptions of the nation-state; and the whole question of literary national character thus took on a particular cast in this historical context. To describe that particularity will be my primary critical responsibility in the chapters that follow. Nonetheless, I must begin by acknowledging the fact that nearly all of the “American” cultural problems and solutions I will identify have specific and concrete cultural and historical precursors, far beyond, and long before, the obvious British-American axis of transatlantic comparison.

To begin with, as I have already suggested, the core tension I am identifying in late eighteenth-century U.S. literature had a counterpart in Latin antiquity. Roman authors had similarly to contend with the prestige of foreign models of thought and writing while simultaneously attempting to forge a sense of a distinct cultural identity.⁷⁶ “If the Greeks were the first in Europe to create and record culture,” Elaine Fantham writes, “the Romans, paradoxically, scored a different first. They were the first cultural community to inherit literary models—those set up for them by the Greeks—before they began to compose their own literature.”⁷⁷ We might say, in other words, that this represents the moment “foreign debt” first entered European literature as a problem to be overcome. Obviously, to draw comparisons between “Rome’s groping toward cultural maturity and self-definition”⁷⁸ and the cultural politics of the post-Revolutionary United States is already to indulge in a certain level of transhistorical abstraction. The utility of the analogy has its limits, but that doesn’t make it any less illuminating. It is not simply that “cultural activity and state interest”⁷⁹ came to be yoked together in both instances. More suggestive is how the problem played itself out as a dialectic between alternatives similarly held in discursive tension. Would cultural achievement result from the emulation of imported models, or would it issue from the “well-springs of native soil”⁸⁰—allochthony or autochthony? This question would repeat itself over and over throughout European literary history, but the moment of its first articulation has the advantage of laying the logic bare like almost no later iteration. For, framed in those terms, it was an insoluble dilemma: the problem of foreign cultural influence could not be met simply by either the incorporation or the abjection of Greek models.⁸¹ Insofar as the foreign model is practically coterminous with cultural prestige itself, the guardians of the emergent culture can no more “reject” it than they can give up any claim to legitimacy; yet insofar as the prestige culture is irreducibly foreign, it cannot simply be adopted wholesale without abandoning the search for national characteristics.⁸² What was needed was a third possibility. In the Roman context, as elites and cultural producers “gradually came to terms with a culture … that they affected to scorn but in fact assimilated and absorbed,” they eventually arrived at a complex way of “adapting Greek forms to convey a Roman character within a Hellenistic context.”⁸³ This Roman “manipulation of the Hellenic legacy”⁸⁴ has much to teach us about the comparable twists and turns of early U.S. cultural nationalism and the British and European cultural legacies it claimed to sublimate. Through a similar dialectic of adoption and adaptation, U.S. literary culture would have to come to terms with a set of models it regarded as indispensable, yet problematically foreign. Eventually, that dialectic, too, claimed somehow to have yielded an authentically national culture as its final term.⁸⁵

Beginning in the Middle Ages and intensifying during the various European “renaissances,” this same set of linguistic and cultural questions reasserted itself, though now at one remove: here, the Latin auctores became the objects of influence-anxiety, rather than its subjects and sufferers. This is the problem that shadowed the emergence of the vernacular literatures, where, as with the Roman relationship to the Greeks, the continued necessity of emulating a prestigious tradition (in this case, an antique and no longer “living” foreign one) coincided quite pointedly with the self-assertion of the “vulgar tongue.” This logic played itself out within all of the European vernaculars, starting with Italian. The earliest and most significant case in point is Dante’s De Vulgari Eloquentia (ca. 1307), an unfinished treatise on language which argues for the unique power of the Italian vernacular as the most “illustrious” possible medium for poetry.⁸⁶ Dante asserts more globally that a spoken language is always more immediate, vital, and natural than that “secondary kind of language” which sits “at one remove from us”—namely, the dead and artificial language of the ancients—and that vernacular language is thus, in principle, “the more noble” kind.⁸⁷ Steven Botterill refers to this “revolutionary” assertion as “the Declaration of Independence of the ‘modern languages.’ ”⁸⁸ Americanists should not only take note of the invocation, but also consider what light Dante’s “declaration” might shed on our familiar objects of study and our perennial cultural-historical problematics. The first thing to note is that, as “revolutionary” as the content of Dante’s linguistic argument may be, its style and structure betray the tension between opposed impulses upon which I have already remarked above: to elevate the new national language, on the one hand, and to lay claim to traditional forms of discursive authority, on the other. The most obvious sign of this is the simple fact that Dante must compose his celebration of the vulgar tongue not in Italian but in Latin—and as Botterill observes, a particularly “graceful” and “mellifluous” Latin, at that.⁸⁹ These are the same paradoxes that abound in Revolutionary rhetoric; when Thomas Jefferson declared independence from England, he did so in English.⁹⁰ In Dante’s case, the use of Latin spoke not only to the complex negotiation between emulation and disaffiliation, but even more fundamentally to the central problem of his treatise: after sorting through the “cacophony of the many varieties of Italian speech,” Dante must conclude that the “illustrious, cardinal, aulic, and curial vernacular”⁹¹ he promises does not yet exist in Italy—except as a potential. It must still be brought into being. To an Americanist, this too calls to mind the complex problem faced by such “linguistic pioneers” of the Revolutionary period as Noah Webster, who loudly sang the praises of an “American tongue” even as he acknowledged that such a language was still but “a prospect” rather than “an entity already in existence.”⁹² Within the realm of poetry more particularly, we might look ahead to Walt Whitman’s 1855 preface to Leaves of Grass, a politico-poetic manifesto in a very real sense descended from De Vulgari Eloquentia. Whitman, too, weighs the power of “the English language” against “the grand American expression”—not quite as the relationship between a dead language and a living vernacular, but certainly as that between a morbid inherited language system (like the “corpse” that is “slowly borne” from the house in the first paragraph of the preface) and the vital speech of a new language community (“the stalwart and wellshaped heir who approaches”).⁹³

Dante’s argument on behalf of the Italian language would be succeeded by many more on behalf of different “illustrious” vernaculars. “If our language is not as copious and rich as Greek or Latin,” wrote Joachim Du Bellay in the Pléiade manifesto, La Deffence et Illustration de la Langue Françoise (1549), “that should not be imputed to any defect in it.”⁹⁴ The French vulgaire has simply been insufficiently cultivated and “illustrated” (that is, made illustrious, given luster). “I cannot better … persuade you to write in [the vulgar tongue] than by showing you how to enrich it and render it illustrious [l’enrichir et illustrer].”⁹⁵ For Du Bellay, the means to “illustration” is strategic imitation: French poets must begin to imitate the poetry of the ancient Greeks and Romans,⁹⁶ as well as the best poets among the Italians and Spanish⁹⁷—yet to do so in their own vernacular. After all, this was precisely what the Romans had done to cultivate their own vernacular when it lay in the shadow of Greece: “By what means were [the Romans] able so to enrich their language, indeed to make it almost the equal of Greek? By imitating the best Greek authors, transforming themselves into them, devouring them, and, after having thoroughly digested them, converting them into blood and nourishment, selecting, each according to his own nature and the topic he wished to choose, the best author, all of whose rarest and most exquisite strengths they diligently observed and, like shoots, grafted them … and adapted them to their own language.”⁹⁸ Du Bellay draws here on a long tradition of theorizing imitation; in fact, the digestive metaphor with which he begins is itself an imitation of an analogy first used by Seneca.⁹⁹ The most important thing to note about digestion as a figure for emulation—one that was utilized by a range of Renaissance authors—is that it suggests not just the copying of a model, but its transformation.¹⁰⁰ Du Bellay’s prescription is to begin by selecting the “best author” from the past to suit present purposes; yet once that model is “devoured,” “digested,” and “converted” in this way, he is no longer the same author who had been plucked from tradition. Having been remetabolized and combined with one’s organic material, he now belongs to the vernacular culture.¹⁰¹ The result of that process is thus—and here Du Bellay shifts from a metaphor of animal digestion to one of botanical growth—a graft, a new hybrid. If the French poets learn this double lesson well, he argues, the “time will perhaps come—and with the help of the good fortune of France, I have high hopes for it—when this noble and powerful kingdom will in its turn seize the reins of universal dominion and when our language … which is just beginning to put down roots, will spring from the ground and grow to such height and girth that it will equal the Greeks and Romans themselves, producing, like them, Homers, Demosthenes, Virgils, and Ciceros.”¹⁰² Here, Du Bellay isolates the arboreal variant of the organic metaphor which would serve Anglo-American culture so well: a transplanted culture had been bedded out to unaccustomed soil, shot down roots, and somehow become sui generis after the fact. As we shall see in Chapter 2, Crèvecoeur in particular would make maximum use of this arboreal trope in his bid to argue for the ex post facto originality of a borrowed or derivative cultural form. Yet the most general lesson for Americanists in this literary prehistory is the manner in which imitation and innovation, in some sense opposed impulses, are never represented as mutually exclusive. They are inextricable aspects of the same cultural gesture, no more separable than the two sides of a coin. The assumption common to these cultural scenarios is that literary and cultural production will necessarily be constituted out of a dialectic between deference to borrowed traditions and the independence of vernacular expression. If emulation is performed properly, adoption is really adaptation; imitation is really supplementation; and the “copy” is capable of becoming a new and distinctive origin.¹⁰³ This cultural fantasy of the copy that displaces the original was perhaps the single most important idea animating later Anglo-American literary arguments on behalf of national originality.

The earliest literature in the English vernacular displayed a very similar dynamic in the interplay between deferential emulation and the self-assertion of originality. Yet this dynamic took on a peculiar hue in English writing, which may have had a uniquely “uneasy” cultural status for specific historical and linguistic reasons. As outlined in a recent treatment of the subject, The Idea of the Vernacular: An Anthology of Middle English Literary Theory, 1280–1520, early literature in the English vernacular effectively incorporated into itself a “theoretical” argument about the distinctive features of the English language, and the sorts of literary style it was capable of voicing, as part of a “broader literary reflection on the complex position occupied by English literature (a newcomer in fifteenth-century European terms) in relation to other European vernacular literatures and to their great precursors.”¹⁰⁴ The historical origins of this argument lie in the late fourteenth century, when English emerged as a literary language that could claim legitimacy alongside languages with far greater cultural prestige.¹⁰⁵ Prior to that point, as Paul Strohm notes, “English had been almost entirely sidelined by Latin (as the language of record keeping and theological disputation), Anglo-Norman (as the language of courts and the law), and Continental French (as the literary language of the cosmopolitan English court).”¹⁰⁶ What English writing there was between 1200 and 1330, as Nicholas Watson argues, was “relatively rare” and “seems on the whole to have been more the product of local efforts to create an English literary style from the ground up than the expression of a continuous … tradition.”¹⁰⁷ In the late fourteenth century, though, the use of English “surged”; helped by the writings of Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower, and Thomas Usk, it “began to win respect as a literary language” in its own right.¹⁰⁸ English writers drew immediately and deeply on Latin and French sources, but they also necessarily found themselves confronting “issues specific to the [English] vernacular”—a language marked by “flexibility and dialectical variety,” one that “had yet to be standardized, bore a close relation to the spoken word, and was struggling for cultural recognition.”¹⁰⁹

English vernacular writing emerged, then, amid a pervasive “sense of insufficiency about the language’s Germanic core” and the correlative expansion of the English lexicon, via loans from French and Latin, that was taking place in the latter half of the fourteenth century.¹¹⁰ Literature in English, marked at its inception by a self-consciousness about the belatedness of its arrival, and emerging in the context of assumptions about the relative limitations of English as a literary medium, thus had to be “justified and defined” at once.¹¹¹ As I discuss in Chapter 1, we can still (many centuries later) see this awareness of English’s foreign indebtedness, along with an avowal of the problems it created for English spelling and rules of construction, in Samuel Johnson’s mid-eighteenth-century attempt to “fix” the language and in Noah Webster’s more aggressive attempt to provide a new and more rational lexical standard. This history helps explain the pull within English-language writing toward modes associated with the “plain” or “low” style, and, relatedly, the pervasiveness of conventional modesty or humility topoi within that writing. As I will clarify in Chapter 4 below, the ideal of stylistic plainness is by no means an exclusive feature of the English cultural tradition (its definition has obvious sources in ancient Greek and Latin rhetoric). And the topos of linguistic humility (also with clear classical precursors, as I discuss in Chapter 2), was to some extent characteristic of all vernacular literary traditions as they struggled to differentiate themselves from earlier languages of prestige, whether those be “dead” classical languages or better established contemporary vernaculars. Nevertheless, modesty topoi did take on a very particular emphasis in English-language writing—baked, as we might say, into anglophone literary culture at its very origins. Many Middle English texts immediately and clearly adopt an apologetic tone, expressing a particular concern for their “rudeness” and lack of polish. The editors of The Idea of the Vernacular easily compile a catalog of such conventional rhetorical gestures: Geoffrey Chaucer avers that “ryme in Englissh hat such skarsete” that rhyming becomes a “gret penaunce” for him; John Walton laments the “defaute of langage and of eloquence” limiting his attempt to translate Boethius; Thomas Usk apologizes for his “rude wordes and boystous [i.e., rough and unpolished diction],” George Ashby for his “blondryng,” John Metham for his “rude endytyng [i.e., composition or writing],” and so on.¹¹²

Now, given the linguistic and literary-historical context to which I have just alluded, one might first assume that all these apologies for the deficiencies of English simply reflected anxiety about the relative “poverty” of the lexicon compared to more established languages, along with a more specific insecurity “in the face of the high cultural tradition of France.”¹¹³ Though there is truth in both, it would be a serious mistake simply to take such expressions at face value. For “anxiety” in these texts is less a form of affect than it is “a controlled rhetorical attitude.”¹¹⁴ That much may be obvious to readers familiar with such topoi, but it must be added that this “attitude” performs more work here than the traditional rhetorical function of inoculation against negative criticism.¹¹⁵ In the vernacular context, as I have already indicated above, expressions of modesty in relation to great precursors served, in a somewhat paradoxical way, precisely to “establish both a poet’s own achievement and that of the vernacular literary tradition in which the poet is working.”¹¹⁶ In the English case, one clear historical indication of this logic is the fact that “expressions of diffidence or defensiveness about the lexical and stylistic resources of English” actually seem to become more frequent during the very period when writing in English was finally becoming more established.¹¹⁷ Another tell is that it is the most “highly elaborate” literary performances that tend to “apologize most often for their rough language.”¹¹⁸ The paradoxical result is an abundance of “luxuriantly expressed anxiety about the ‘dullness’ of English” in fifteenth-century invocations of an English literary tradition that was coming into its own.¹¹⁹ In these ways, linguistic and authorial modesty topoi could actually “function as inverted self-advertisement.”¹²⁰

The ability to unravel these complex rhetorical tangles is absolutely crucial to understanding the much later “American” career of these topoi of self-deprecation and the literary styles they attended. The eighteenth- and nineteenth-century negotiations over “American language” and “American literature” are in a direct line with earlier dynamics in the history of English, with one obvious difference: (British) English itself has now become the language of prestige, the standard in relation to which American English must be “justified and defined.”¹²¹ But beneath the reshuffling of linguistic subjects and objects, these rhetorical performances on behalf of English and other self-styled “anxious” vernaculars are remarkably indicative of the American arguments later to unfold on behalf of its own. In Chapter 2, for example, I locate Crèvecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer, which makes ample use of the topos of stylistic humility, very much in this rhetorical lineage.

And yet, as I have already argued, the historical repetition of these earlier episodes in Western literary history was marked by a fundamental difference. The late eighteenth-century American version of this cultural process was marked by the linguistic situation specific to a settler nation, which is to say, a culture marked by all the discursive formations of “vernacular anxiety,” yet strangely lacking its own vernacular (“a people without a language,” in Coleridge’s cutting phrase).¹²² In effect, it was “style” that filled this peculiar gap. In the absence of a unique vernacular, the idea of literary style served as a particularly effective mechanism for resolving this age-old dialectic between imitation and innovation. The concept was indispensable here precisely for its second-order nature: style located originality not in the language itself, nor in the generic form, but in the manner of its utterance. In linguistic terms, an accent. In literary terms, a style. The conceptual movement here can be visualized spatially as a vertical shift of level, something like the combination of a letter with a diacritical mark. Just as the diacritic draws the eye to a space above the line and the ear to the distinguishing tonal differences between homographs, the concept of a style draws the mind from a primary order of language to a second-order metalanguage hovering in the space above it. Like an accent, a style is an overlay; the distinctions it asserts are not substantial, but modal. It offers no new forms, but points to a distinct way of enunciating the old ones. This cultural logic of difference-in-repetition is definitive and constitutive for U.S. literature, for only through some such notion can a settler culture explain how it has turned something borrowed into something new.

* * *

Precisely because it resided on the side of neither “form” nor “content,” style made it possible for writers to assert simultaneously that they were emulating British models and that their enunciations of those models had a “native” originality tied to some peculiarly American quality. In all of the literary cases this book considers, then, the American work explicitly understood itself in correspondence to a foreign model it emulated, and yet defined itself in opposition to this same model. A founding premise of my book is that such “arguments” were most importantly articulated not in a critical corpus of writing about early U.S. literature, but in the literary texts themselves. This was not only an argument about style but also one conducted through style and immanent in style. In that sense, as “American literature” was writing itself into existence, it was simultaneously theorizing itself as such. This may seem clearest in the case of someone like Charles Brockden Brown, for example, in whose work critics easily find metafictional elements and other signs of intense self-consciousness about its aesthetic goals; but I would argue that it is more broadly true of the period’s literary production. The readings that follow thus key into the self-theorizing dimension of early U.S. literature to see how it cast itself, at one and the same time, as a set of emulations of British models and as pure products of America. Indeed, as I suggest in the book’s coda, a striking number of later critical conceptions about what is American about American literature were in a sense elaborate scholarly glosses on arguments made first in literary form.

While the logic of literary debt is central to the premise of this book, I do not pursue it by means of a comparative literary inquiry in the standard sense. While I make frequent and substantial reference to British literary culture in the period, and while I will continue to refer back on occasion to the European sources of American claims to national originality, I do not proceed by holding transatlantic literary works side by side in order to gauge their similarities and differences. For I am less interested in evaluating American assertions of literary distinction (say, by subjecting it to comparative readings that would give the lie to them by exposing what was imitated) than in anatomizing the fantasy of national originality and analyzing the cultural materials out of which it was built. In order to do that properly, of course, one cannot only tease out novelty claims immanent in literary works; one needs also to reconstruct and understand the broader critical and aesthetic milieu that animated the self-theorizing and metaliterary gestures of the period’s imaginative literature.

It is an interesting feature of this first wave of literary nationalism that there appears at first to be no robust archive of extraliterary source material alongside the literary work to which we can turn for such context. This seems to set it apart from the later waves of literary nationalism, which produced a discrete and still familiar body of such material. So, for example, we feel we can learn at least as much about the nationalist aims of Cooper’s fiction from the periodical literature of the decade that preceded it—such classic pieces as Walter Channing’s “Essay on American Language and Literature” (1815) and Edward Tyrell Channing’s “On Models in Literature” (1816), along with other American entries in the transatlantic “Paper Wars,” that exchange of cultural salvos fired in the pages of periodicals like the North American Review and the Edinburgh Review. Similarly, as much as we ask the literary works of the American Renaissance to stand on their own as our version of a “great tradition,” any investigation of their cultural-nationalist underpinnings would likely begin with Emerson’s “The American Scholar” address, the critical writings of the mid-nineteenth-century “Young America” movement, or Melville’s satirical treatment of it in “Young America in Literature.” By contrast, the apparent lack of a similar critical archive parallel to the literary works of the post-Revolutionary period—or, rather, preceding the literary production and feeding into it, as in the above examples—may be partly what entices us to read forward in time, hastily assimilating them to the literary production of later periods and finding the earlier works wanting in comparison.

Yet there was in fact a critical context proper to this earlier literary tradition, though it was not the exclusively “American” one we expect it to be by analogy with later waves of literary nationalism. That context is the transatlantic, but chiefly British, writing on “taste” during the eighteenth century. By replacing early U.S. literature in that critical environment, it becomes possible to recover the cultural conversation that finds early American writers implicitly responding to earlier British critics and theorists like Joseph Addison, Edmund Burke, and Hugh Blair, and rather selfconsciously locating themselves in relation to eighteenth-century, and largely pre-Kantian, theories of what would later be termed “the aesthetic.” We stand to learn much more from these more contemporaneous transatlantic exchanges than from imagining a transhistorical communion that finds Charles Brockden Brown and Joel Barlow calling prophetically ahead to their future countrymen Nathaniel Hawthorne and Walt Whitman.

Specific aesthetic concepts will receive focused discussions in the individual chapters below, but the general claim that is fairly consistent across the range of the literary examples I consider is the fantasy that a cisatlantic literature would finally instantiate and fully actualize an aesthetic that British criticism had already been able to describe on the far side of the Atlantic, but that Britain’s literature had never itself been able to incarnate. That fully realized “American aesthetic” is most familiarly described in terms of characteristics like “authenticity” or “sincerity” (the pair of concepts Lionel Trilling explored in a 1972 book), vernacularity (a feature of the “best” American prose that is generally thought to have reached it apotheosis in Twain), the triumph of the “plain” style (“the presiding rule of American prose,” according to Perry Miller), and so on.¹²³ But what I will frequently emphasize in the earliest articulations of these and other literary characteristics is the crucial fact that they were always defined privatively rather than positively, for they aimed above all to claim for themselves a world apart from the polish and disguise of European traditions of letters. Thus, what we call Crèvecoeur’s rustic style was self-described as “incorrect” and “inelegant”; Brown’s tortuous style was sublimely “irregular”; and the plain style valued by the seduction plot really could ever only identify itself as “artless,” that is, as the salutary absence of ornament and artifice. The utter consistency of all of this subtractive definition ought to make us reconsider the old saws about the American “voice” and to recognize the idea not as some organic expression of a national character but as the mythic end result of a self-conscious cultural exertion. Whatever an “American voice” in literature is or has become, it does not have its source in some originary set of national characteristics; rather, it was derived, I am convinced, out of a deliberate operation of cultural negation or subtraction—rather like an algebraic solution to a cultural equation.

The chapters that follow trace several versions of this process as it unfolded in relation to specific genres and literary figures. These were “literary arguments” in a dual sense: arguments about literary form conducted largely through literary form. To lay the groundwork for the literary-historical sequence that follows it, Chapter 2 begins with the purely linguistic side of the story: Noah Webster’s plan to “introduce order and regularity into the orthography of the AMERICAN TONGUE” as the cultural location where the logic of difference-in-repetition was being worked out most clearly in the late eighteenth century. Webster’s solution to the problem of a national language was not to invent a new vernacular but rather to “reform the mode of spelling.”¹²⁴ Orthographic reform went to work at a very particular level of linguistic practice, between surface and substance. For once Webster committed to modifying an existing language rather than building a new one from scratch, he had to think up a way to alter the manner in which the language was used without discarding the basic materials of that language. Put simply, he needed to propose a modal change. What Webster thus devises is less an “American language” than “American-style English.” This linguistic solution was thus the perfect analogy for a literary solution, which would use a similarly modal logic to describe the distinction between English literary culture and its Anglo-American rearticulation as a change in style.

Chapter 2 turns to Crèvecoeur’s epistolary narrative Letters from an American Farmer (1782) as one of the most successful attempts to define literary Americanness in stylistic terms. The linchpin of Crèvecoeur’s prose style is the self-deprecating gesture of contrast between the American’s awkward language and the elegance and polish of polite English letters. Thus, while most critics focus on the work’s naïve narrator, Farmer James, I focus on the ontologically prior imaginative act that enables James to show himself: the invention of the farmer’s urbane British correspondent. This correspondent is everywhere and nowhere; we never read his letters, but James everywhere defines his own epistolary voice by contrast with them. Moreover, despite the farmer’s extravagant posture of “American” naïveté, Crèvecoeur cannily fashions this version of an American style out of traditional European literary topoi and theories of the aesthetic. The farmer’s letters recombine these literary materials and then recirculate them for a transatlantic audience fascinated by literary Americanness as an exotic new cultural substance. Ever since, American literary history has had to grapple with the awkward possibility that an Anglophilic French gentleman may have pioneered “our” literary style.

Charles Brockden Brown, the subject of Chapter 3, worked within the gothic novel form to make a different kind of “Americanness” claim supposed to be linked to the unique topographical features of the American landscape. This, too, was a skillful modal revision of a variety of concepts from British literary culture, for he deliberately mapped his American landscapes according to all of the features associated with the natural sublime in British criticism and the stock settings of gothic fiction: high cliffs and deep chasms, cataracts and obscure recesses. What I call Brown’s “aesthetic fallacy”—the deliberately cultivated illusion that the natural world produces particular literary effects—served symbolically to dispel this anxiety of influence by displacing the author function onto the landscape itself and concealing the elaborate labor of adapting British gothic for a putatively new national mode. In so doing, he also linked this set of topographical features to a stylistic gambit, crafting a prose style that flaunted a kind of sublime “irregularity” meant to lift its readers to precipitous and dizzying aesthetic heights. The particular manner in which Brown brought the gothic novel across the Atlantic thus resulted in a curious paradox: if, from a certain perspective, “American gothic” could be nothing but an imitation of the European model, there was nonetheless a powerful illusion that the copy exceeded the originality of the original.

I turn in Chapter 4 to the American seduction plots of the period, in both their theatrical and fictional forms. Works such as Susanna Rowson’s Charlotte Temple (1791), Hannah Webster Foster’s The Coquette (1797), and Royall Tyler’s play The Contrast (1787), though known more for their moral and political arguments than for their aesthetic impact, in fact made strong and influential arguments about the unadorned virtues of plain American speech and writing. While these stories posed the same character oppositions as the British seduction plot—between the double-tongued Chesterfieldian seducer and the plainspoken man of feeling, or the parallel opposition between the elegant and artful highborn woman and the artless beauty of the virtuous “fair”—American authors refigured them as the opposition between European and American character and language, marking the latter as a more authentic mode of expression. In doing so, they recruited the “plain style,” which was in fact an expressive mode with a long European genealogy, as the basis of a putatively American way of speaking or writing. In this way, the American seduction story repackaged manifestly borrowed literary materials as unique signs of national originality.