example, I do so by exposing the origin of the central mystification they redress: the moment when literary production in the U.S. first began to refer to itself as “American literature,” not only obscuring its transatlantic debts and resonances but making the nation stand synecdochically for the continent in what has become a peculiarly powerful cultural distortion. This moment inaugurated a fateful cultural process by which “U.S. literature” famously took hold of the conceptual space of “American literature” and claimed rights to it; so powerful was this appropriation that it now requires us to deploy “new” hemispheric methodologies to restore what should really have been a simple matter of denotation.52 But just as importantly, something of the opposite cultural formation also dates back to this same historical moment. The decades after the Revolution marked, in a sense, the original “transatlantic turn,” when just-emerging concepts of U.S. identity first did battle over the precise nature of its relation to Britishness—not as a theoretical matter of critical method, but a practical matter of cultural production and ethnic identification. My most difficult and most important task is to come up with a satisfactory account of the relationship between these strangely twinned cultural formations.
* * *
Joseph Roach has observed that stories of cultural origin proceed “along two general axes of possibility”—that they come, in effect, in two flavors. First, “the diasporic, which features migration,” and second, “the autochthonous, which claims indigenous roots deeper than memory itself.”53 This distinction is related to a structural opposition often framed in anthropological work as allochthony versus autochthony. This is the opposition often implicitly at work when competing claims to political power are symbolically resolved by assigning a myth of origins to a ruler: the allochthon is the stranger-king, the ruler who has come from elsewhere and brought his exotic power with him; the autochthon is the local king with wholly indigenous roots, whose legitimacy springs from the earth itself.54 At issue in my project is how such myths are used to tell origin stories about literature and culture, rather than to legitimate political rule, but the same conceptual possibilities are in play. Is American literature an allochthonous body of Old World learning and letters that has been transferred to the New World, or is it an autochthonous growth from American earth? From where does its prestige and vitality originate, its transatlantic origins or its cisatlantic destination? Or, to put it in terms that I will explore in the book’s coda: Which is determinative, stock or soil—varietal or terroir? One of my most surprising findings is the manner in which these seemingly incommensurable origin stories powerfully, if illogically, mingled in the late eighteenth-century invention of “American literature” and have continued to do so ever since.55 Their strange coexistence is one of the reasons that both the nation-centered versions of our cultural history and its various transnationalist revisions will always continue to have interpretive traction. Ultimately, there is no choosing between these alternatives, simply because they are not just argumentative positions or methodological paradigms; they are aspects of a contradictory definition of U.S. national character that lie at the very historical source of that idea.
What I try to capture in this book, then, is the double logic by which an emergent U.S. literary culture at once asserted its continuities with, and its radical departures from Britishness—abjecting and incorporating it at once. The logic of negative affiliation was what enabled its first cultural producers to manage this inherent contradiction. As I have already indicated, this way of understanding the problem is intended, first and foremost, as a revision of the Anglophobia thesis that used to govern the literary history of the Revolutionary period. But at the same time, its differential logic should also sound distinct in emphasis from that of Tennenhouse’s “British diaspora” or Tamarkin’s “Anglophilia.” On the one hand, Anglo-Americans were explicitly attempting to transfer the characteristic elements of English culture elsewhere. On the other hand, however, some of the authors of this transferred culture then immediately turned around and claimed a radical originality generated by that “elsewhere.” In the terms of the botanical figure which was so often used to frame such matters of cultural transfer, a transplanted stock has sent down roots into unaccustomed earth, and that new soil has in turn begun to exert a transformative effect on the old stock. In order to tell both sides of this story, we must grasp how Anglo-American literary culture sutured the fantasy of autochthony to the reality of cultural allochthony. It did so not by claiming a kinship with actual indigenous cultures but rather by asserting that Englishness itself underwent a process of being positively transformed by the American genius loci. Neither “Anglophobia” nor “Anglophilia” can capture the full range of cultural affect involved in this logic of negative affiliation.
Literary Foreign Debt and the Order of Style
Though I have occasionally referred to American literary distinctiveness as an “idea,” my most significant argument in this book is that literary Americanness was not thought into existence as a concept so much as written into existence as style. I have already used that term several times in the pages above, but I have now to theorize it properly, to account for its particular usage in the late eighteenth century, and to explain why such a concept would have come to bear such crucial cultural weight in the context of the literary problem I am investigating. The word “style” sees a lot of use in the period (“stile” was the more typical eighteenth-century spelling), but I am interested less in tracking the occurrences of a word than analyzing the functioning of the concept, whether or not the term itself was inked to paper on a given occasion.
Style, I shall argue, was the concept that a burgeoning national literature seized on as a solution to the problem of literary foreign debt—a notion I borrow from Franco Moretti and Roberto Schwarz. Recruiting world-Systems theory in order to rethink literary relations on the model of global economy, Moretti’s “Conjectures on World Literature” (2000) argued that literary history too should recognize a world “simultaneously one, and unequal: with a core, and a periphery (and a semiperiphery) that are bound together in a relationship of growing inequality” (56). He then adapted and generalized a trope from Schwarz’s study of Brazilian literature in particular: “Foreign debt is as inevitable in Brazilian letters as in any other field.”56 The economic metaphor is always “subterraneously at work in literary history,” writes Moretti, but what would it mean to elevate it into a fully realized theory of literature: “ ‘foreign debt’ as a complex literary feature”57 of international literary relations? With the novel supplying the test case, Moretti arrived at “comparative morphology,” the study of how a literary form is forced to adapt as it moves from its original context into a new one, where the now “foreign form” encounters new “local materials.” Thus the importation of the novel from its Western European points of origin into India, Japan, Brazil, the Philippines, and so on turns out to provide so many models of this “compromise between foreign form and local materials,” while what we thought was “the rule of the rise of the novel (the Spanish, the French, and especially the British case)” turn out instead to be the exceptions.58 Adaptation of a foreign form is the “law of literary evolution.”59
While examples from and references to the United States are notably absent from “Conjectures on World Literature,” there is no question that its central dialectic of formal adoption and adaptation is an enormously productive lens for the emergence of U.S. literature. For as I have already indicated, early U.S. writing was intensely aware of itself as a set of local varieties of borrowed types, and the literary dynamics of foreign debt remained a constant presence throughout the early national period, not only in the wake of the War of 1812. From this vantage point, the fashioning of a U.S. literary culture looks less like a “rise” of a national literature and more like one of those “compromise[s] between foreign form and local materials”60 by which Moretti characterizes the novel’s adaptation into Japan, Brazil, or the Philippines. But I am just as interested in the limits of this comparison. For in these other scenarios of literary adaptation, the adapted form immediately differs from the borrowed model in one irreducible respect: language itself. As the novel moves to Brazil or Japan, it crosses not just a geographical barrier but also a national-linguistic one; adaptation
