Literature, American Style: The Originality of Imitation in the Early Republic

By Ezra Tawil

Between 1780 and 1800, authors of imaginative literature in the new United States wanted to assert that their works, which bore obvious connections to anglophone literature on the far side of the Atlantic, nevertheless constituted a properly "American" tradition. No one had yet figured out, however, 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 generate. Literature, American Style returns to this historical moment—decades before the romantic nationalism of Cooper, the transcendentalism of Emerson and Thoreau, or the iconoclastic poetics of Whitman—when a fantasy about the unique characteristics of U.S. literature first took shape, and when that notion was linked to literary style.

While late eighteenth-century U.S. literature advertised itself as the cultural manifestation of a radically innovative nation, Ezra Tawil argues, it was not primarily marked by invention or disruption. In fact, its authors self-consciously imitated European literary traditions while adapting them to a new cultural environment. These writers gravitated to the realm of style, then, because it provided a way of sidestepping the uncomfortable reality of cultural indebtedness; it was their use of style that provided a way of departing from European literary precedents. Tawil analyzes Noah Webster's plan to reform the American tongue; J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur's fashioning of an extravagantly naïve American style from well-worn topoi; Charles Brockden Brown's adaptations of the British gothic; and the marriage of seduction plots to American "plain style" in works such as Susanna Rowson's Charlotte Temple and Hannah Webster Foster's The Coquette. Each of these works claims to embody something "American" in style yet, according to Tawil, remains legible only in the context of stylistic, generic, and conceptual forms that animated English cultural life through the century.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Release date: Jul 16, 2018
• ISBN: 9780812295290

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Literature, American Style

LITERATURE, AMERICAN STYLE

THE ORIGINALITY OF IMITATION IN THE EARLY REPUBLIC

EZRA TAWIL

UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS

PHILADELPHIA

Copyright © 2018 University of Pennsylvania Press

All rights reserved.

Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.

Published by

University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Tawil, Ezra F., author.

Title: Literature, American style : the originality of imitation in the early Republic / Ezra Tawil.

Description: 1st edition. | Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, [2018] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018002988 | ISBN 978-0-8122-5037-4 (hardcover : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: American literature—1783–1850—History and criticism. | National characteristics, American, in literature. | Nationalism and literature—United States. | English language—United States—Orthography and spelling—History—18th century. | English language—United States—Style.

Classification: LCC PS195.N35 T39 2018 | DDC 810.9/35873—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018002988

For Kirsten

and

for Jules

The literature that should characterize a great people is always interesting to examine, I believe: the literature of an enlightened people, who have established liberty, political equality, and manners in harmony with such institutions. Right now the Americans are the only nation in the universe to which these reflections are applicable. Americans may still have no developed literature, but when their men in public office are called upon to address public opinion they obviously possess the gift of touching the soul’s affections with simple truths and pure feelings. Anyone who can do this already knows the most useful secrets of style.

—Germaine de Staël, On Literature (1800)

CONTENTS

Introduction. Style and the Cisatlantic

Chapter 1. To Form a More Perfect Language: Noah Webster’s American-Style English

Chapter 2. Transatlantic Correspondences: Crèvecoeur and the Incorrect Style

Chapter 3. New Forms of Sublimity: Charles Brockden Brown and the Irregular Style

Chapter 4. Homespun Habits: Seduction, Sentiment, and the Artless Style

Coda. Stock and Soil

Notes

Index

Acknowledgments

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