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
