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.
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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
