literary forms crossed an ocean but no such language boundary. With no distinct vernacular in place to mark the instant and irreducible difference of the transferred form, this emergent literature had to find some other basis for its putatively national character if it wanted to claim the existence of such a thing.
“Customs, habits, and language, as well as government, should be national,” wrote Noah Webster in 1789. “America should have her own distinct from all the world. Such is the policy of other nations and such must be our policy, before the states can either be independent or respectable.”61 Note the counterfactual mood that reigns here, as it tends to do in Webster’s writing in particular and early U.S. cultural nationalisms in general: America “should” have a national language, it “must” have one, but even after a bold act of federal reconstitution, it as yet does not. How, then, could this nation hope to bind itself to itself as a unity without even possessing its own tongue? “Nations arose from languages, and not languages from nations,” Isidore of Seville had written in his seventh-century treatise The Etymologies.62 Webster’s linguistic plan, insofar as it attempted to form a national language after the constitution of a national government, inverted this age-old law of the generation of languages: it proposed to make a language from a nation.63 And whether Webster and his contemporaries succeeded at all in doing so remained a point of contention and mockery well into the nineteenth century. “The Americans,” Samuel Taylor Coleridge pointedly quipped in 1822, “presented the extraordinary anomaly of a people without a language.”64
Against the background of this linguistic problem, the cultural object we call “American literature” would seem to be an even more perverse impossibility: How could a nation with a borrowed language even dare to dream of producing its own authentic tradition of letters? To use the economic metaphor again, founding a national literature in such a cultural environment was something like founding a national economy without minting a new currency. This problem made the literature of the anglophone United States a particular case but by no means a unique one, for here it was shaped by a set of cultural relations shared with all nations born from settler colonialism. As Donald Denoon and other scholars of comparative colonialism have demonstrated, the disparate cultural histories of South Africa, Australia, Argentina, and others share not only particular economic structures but also “ ‘exceptionalist’ ideologies … common to settler regimes.”65 The remarkable irony yielded by this comparative view, put simply, is that American exceptionalism—whether in its political, economic, or cultural incarnations—is unexceptional. And yet, as this scholarship also makes clear, the cultural elites in such settler societies do tend rather insistently to represent the nation in exceptionalist terms. As Michael Denning argues, the ideological formation we know as American exceptionalism is thus best and most accurately understood as a particular local variety of what he calls “settler exceptionalism.”66 To explain this in the simplest terms: it stands to reason that a settler nation, for which “foreign debt” is an ineluctable social fact, might insist on its cultural uniqueness and autonomy in a compensatory way. It was a way of dealing with the problem of culture endemic to the settler nation: cultural life is lived in a metropolitan language rather than in a unique vernacular. This problem deeply affects the project of a literary nationalism and determines the shape any such formation seems logically bound to take. And, in the case of the anglophone United States, at least, I believe that style was the solution to this cultural and linguistic dilemma.
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“Stile” could be glossed in the eighteenth century, rather simply, as “the choice of words and the manner of arranging them.”67 In this technical sense, style was a second-order linguistic concept, consisting not in the words themselves but in the particularity of their selection and combination. Thus, in its more generalized sense, style signified a mode of expression, a way of referring to how different speakers, orators, or writers might wield the same linguistic elements in distinct ways. This made it possible to name different poetic or prose styles as baroque, plain, pastoral, and so on. The later sumptuary or sartorial senses of the term were built upon these primary linguistic meanings (etymologically, the English word “style” is derived from the Latin “stilus,” a writing instrument),68 thus playing on the traditional association between modes of dress and styles of address. The important point is that across the range of its usage, “style” always points to a locus of difference in repetition: one exhibits a style when one participates in a common practice but does so in a particular manner. Also significant here is that, where later usage tends to associate style with individual differences (the singular mark or “signature” of an author), during this period it more commonly referred to collective distinctions of class, occupation, region, or nation.69 The logic of “national style” thus provided American writers at the end of the eighteenth century with exactly what they needed: a way of asserting that they borrowed literary forms but “wore” them differently: English literature, American style.
This is not to say that the concept of style itself is in any way an invention of modern settler cultures. Obviously, we can look to classical rhetorical manuals, and particularly those of Latin antiquity, for a theoretical and practical body of writing on style that remained very in circulation during the eighteenth century. As has been well documented in early American scholarship, not only were the political structures of the Roman Republic an ever-present point of comparison and contrast (both in idealizing and cautionary terms) for the new United States, but the cultural products and oratorical traditions of ancient Rome were treated as a crucial training ground for aspiring American writers and rhetoricians.70 I would sharpen the point further: in Latin rhetorical treatises, post-Revolutionary Americans found not only practical manuals of style—their “Strunk and White,” so to speak—but also a theoretical model for the use of “style” to establish cultural uniqueness in the face of foreign influence.
When Roman rhetoricians began to deal with the Greek inheritance within their own particular sphere of activity, the question of style similarly began to take on a broader cultural denotation, rather than simply referring to a feature of individual expression. The locus classicus is Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria, published in the late first century CE. Though many sections of the work address the cultivation of style in the Roman schoolboy, citizen, and would-be orator, the most crucial discussion appears in Book VIII: “What the Greeks call φϱασίς we in Latin call elocutio or style. Style is revealed both in individual words and in groups of words. As regards the former, we must see that they are Latin, clear, elegant and well-adapted to produce the desired effect. As regards the latter, they must be correct, aptly placed and adorned with suitable figures.”71 The words must be Latin: that a fact so obvious must be stated, and recursively instantiated by distinguishing the Greek and Latin signs for “style” itself, indicates that the point is far from trivial. This question of cultural distinction is what marks the emphasis of Book VIII as distinct from Quintilian’s discussions of style earlier in the work: “I have already, in the portions of the first book dealing with the subject of grammar, said all that is necessary on the way to acquire idiomatic and correct speech. But there my remarks were restricted to the prevention of positive faults, and it is well that I should now point out that our words should have nothing provincial or foreign about them.”72 In other words, it is now a matter of cultivating not just a proper style but a properly Roman one. “Idiomatic and correct speech” will not be a function only of choosing the words from the reservoir of the Latin language but also, he emphasizes, of combining those chosen words in a particular way. This is why “idiomatic” and “correct” are conjoined as goals: “For you will find that there are a number of writers by no means deficient in style whose language is precious rather than idiomatic.”73 An idiom (etymologically, a thing that is made one’s own) is a combination of words that, placed in certain relation to one another, have a peculiar meaning in a particular language community. One simple way of putting it is this: even if all of the component words of an idiom were identical or cognate from one language to another, the overall linguistic effect could not be simply translated by substitution of words. This notion of idiomaticity is crucial enough to Quintilian that he gives it anecdotal support
