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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
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
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 Kirstenandfor 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
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.
