this, I will argue, was that Edgeworth and Owenson theorized an ideal relationship to English readers that banished contentious political debates in favor of the purity of literary exchange. Such idealizations proved highly influential as provincial strategies for success; Walter Scott adapted them in the cross-cultural address of the Waverley novels, and Irving and Cooper, avid readers not only of Scott but also of Irish fiction, adapted them with an American twist.
The advantages of the London book trade were demographic, economic, and material. Its dominance, however, was inflected by the remarkably divergent histories of Irish, Scottish, and American bookselling, as Chapter 1 will demonstrate in detail. At the turn of the century, England’s population dwarfed Scotland’s by a factor of five, and low English-language literacy rates in Ireland, whose population in 1800 was over half that of England’s, kept its reading population comparatively small.42 The population of the United States almost equaled England’s by 1830, but the persistent preference for British reprints and a radical trade deficit in the importation of books—a ratio of twenty to one in the late 1820s—neutralized whatever effect the nation’s growing readership may have had on the balance of cultural power.43 London publishers also held long-standing trade monopolies that consolidated economic resources, shut out competition, and fostered the commodification and specialization of literary publishing. The London-printed book was often an imposing material object. Elegantly bound, composed of gathering after gathering of high-quality paper, marked clearly and precisely in fashionable type, and stamped with the imprimatur of an eminent publisher, such a book carried the London trade’s authority out to provincial markets, where readers could easily compare it with their own smaller and scrubby reprints. This produced a hierarchy of printed texts that reinforced geographically inflected cultural hierarchies: the materiality of the London edition powerfully reflected the authority of England itself, built up over centuries and extending far back in time.
The most significant challenge came from Scotland. In the eighteenth century, bookmakers at the height of the Scottish Enlightenment produced editions of equal elegance and importance to their peers in London. In the early nineteenth century, the Scottish trade exploded, as Archibald Constable and William Blackwood launched a series of enterprising publishing ventures, including Constable’s Edinburgh Review, founded in 1802; Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, founded in 1817; and the careers of Walter Scott and a constellation of other Scottish authors, all of which, as Ian Duncan has written, “made Edinburgh a literary metropolis to rival London.”44 Dublin, whose book trade was severely curtailed by the Act of Union, and Philadelphia, Boston, and New York, whose bourgeoning trades depended mostly on reprints, did not mount the kind of opposition Edinburgh mustered. Despite this, however, there persisted in Scotland what Jane Millgate has aptly called “the problem of London.”45 London capitalization and partnership enabled the most ambitious Scottish publishing ventures, including Constable’s and Blackwood’s, and the great majority of Edinburgh-printed books were sent to London for sale and distribution. The Edinburgh Review only mattered, after all, because it left Edinburgh. In the 1820s, moreover, London publishers still issued over 80 percent of new titles within Britain as a whole.46 The state of the book trade varied from place to place and changed significantly over time; London’s dominance was not uniform or monolithic. However, Irish, Scottish, and American authors, readers, and booksellers saw themselves as allies in the literary field and experienced and expressed their subordination in strikingly similar ways. By the 1820s, these similarities were increasingly apparent as provincial literature formed an intertwined and recognizable sector of the market.
The effects of provinciality in many ways confirm Pascale Casanova’s provocative extension of Bourdieu in The World Republic of Letters (2004) to describe the cultural geography of “world literary space.”47 Casanova organizes such space along a continuum of dominant and dominated areas, where literary resources are unevenly distributed between the cultural capitals at the centers of the oldest, most established literary nations and impoverished peripheral nations defined by their “aesthetic distance” from such capitals.48 Authors from dominated nations seek out publication and recognition in the major centers of literary production, “where literary prestige and belief converge in the highest degree.”49 Literary resources are concentrated in those cities whose economies sustain both the production of books and the social world of practitioners who foster debate about the meaning of “literature” itself. Casanova’s paradigmatic literary center is modernist Paris, a city whose consecrating authority organized world literary space into rivalries and divisions remarkably non-coincident with the uneven power relations that define the international socioeconomic order.50 In the early nineteenth century, London dominated its linguistic field with the kind of centralized authority Paris claimed, globally, a century later, but of course no two literary capitals are exactly alike. The importance of translation in modernist Paris did not obtain in a monolingual context, even though Irish, Scottish, and American authors presented their cultures to England in a process James Buzard, referring to Waverley, has called “translation without original.”51 More significantly, London’s authority in the nineteenth century, unlike Paris’s in the twentieth, did indeed overlap with its political and economic dominance as the capital of empire; London, unlike Paris, incorporated marketplace triumphs into its vision of literary excellence (as I have already mentioned), and London, unlike Paris, did not require peripheral authors to reject local literary taste for the sake of a universal standard. Despite these differences, conceiving of an author’s distance from London as “aesthetic distance” has many advantages. It moves beyond the political determinism that has governed the study of Irish, Scottish, and American literature at least since Katie Trumpener’s Bardic Nationalism (1997) expanded the Romantic canon under the rubric of empire and the rise of ideology critique made complicity or resistance to the hegemonic U.S. nation-state the most pressing question in American literary studies. The specific Bourdieuian agenda of Casanova’s model also offers a concrete vision of literary competition that encourages us to eschew easy myths of cosmopolitanism to mark the tightly wound rivalries that inspired the undeniably Anglo-centric authors, booksellers, and readers in this study. Provincial literature was not circumscribed by national boundaries, nor did it transcend them; it flourished through the specific kind of cross-cultural struggle the literary field required.
How did Anglophone provincials fit into world literature, writ large (if we assume, with Casanova, that it exists)? On the most basic level, they were participants and contributors. Edgeworth, Owenson, Scott, Irving, and Cooper all engaged with a multilingual European culture made available to them through the importation of books, translation, and reprinting, as well as their own travels. Their works were translated into multiple foreign languages and often published abroad. Edgeworth was particularly admired in Russia, Irving in Spain, Cooper in Germany, and all of these authors in neighboring France. Scott’s unparalleled impact on world literature can be seen in the spread of the historical novel as a global genre, from Japan to Brazil. Goethe coined the term Weltliteratur in the 1820s to describe an international literary marketplace that Marx and Engels later traced to the rise of the bourgeoisie.52 As market-savvy professionals with thoroughly bourgeois values, the authors of this study fared so well in that marketplace, it may even seem like they weren’t provincial at all. Yet the Romantic dream (or nightmare) of Weltliteratur, evidenced broadly in dissemination and influence, did not affect their formative struggle within the predominantly Anglophone marketplace that was the arena of their initial consecration. This book is concerned with that initial stage, the material conditions of its possibility, and the influential provincial aesthetics it inspired.
The Aesthetics of Provinciality
A paradox recurs throughout modernity: that a great work of literature is both particular and universal, that it arises from a distinct context defined by a unique worldview with its own internal values, and also that it transcends that context, that worldview, and those values. This is a cliché in our own multicultural times, one repeated in cultural contexts high and low, in countless book reviews and citations for literary awards. It is a paradox and not a simple contradiction because the opposed
