interest in transatlantic literary studies over the last quarter century. Dozens of important books have appeared since Robert Weisbuch’s Atlantic Double-Cross (1986) and Paul Gilory’s The Black Atlantic (1993), two foundational texts. Most transatlantic scholarship of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries has either opened up one side of the Atlantic to a myriad of crossings or influences—in Americanist scholarship, usually with England as a single point of reference—or traced parallel stories in Britain and the United States while conceiving of the two nations in a binary relationship. This binary model of competition, however, does not recognize London as the force that put Irish, Scottish, and American literature on common ground. Comparative scholarship on Scotland and America (a venerable subfield its own), moreover, has not reckoned with the book trade’s concrete effects in forming what John Clive and Bernard Bailyn called “England’s cultural provinces,” nor has it found an appropriate place for Ireland as a provincial analog.20 The field of transatlantic studies has proliferated to such an extent that it has become difficult to generalize about its methodological commitments, encompassing as it does traditional studies of literary influence, theoretical meditations on Atlantic modernity, and historicized accounts of discrete locales embedded in transatlantic contexts and circuits of exchange. This book takes “literature” as a category of Atlantic modernity to be investigated through the local sites, transatlantic circuits, and cultural pressures of its emergence. It provides further evidence that the burden of proof now lies with those scholars who still wish to treat literary history in strictly national terms. “The nation,” as Thomas Bender explains, “cannot be its own context.”21
The term transatlantic was used often in the period to characterize objects, ideas, and persons that crossed the Atlantic Ocean or phenomena defined by such crossing; it is in this general sense that I adopt it here. Scott, for example, upon reading a parody of his Lay of the Last Minstrel published in Philadelphia, called it a “a tolerable piece of dull Trans-Atlantic wit”; Irving, discussing the importance of “english reviewers,” declared that “if these transatlantic censors praise [a book], I have no fear of its success in this country”; and the Quarterly Review, reviewing The Sketch Book, referred to “the publications of our transatlantic brethren.”22 Edgeworth also conceived of the ocean as a conduit for traveling texts. She sustained a number of correspondences with friends “across the Atlantic,” as she put it in a letter to the wife of Boston bookseller George Ticknor.23 These included one Mrs. Griffith, who sent her the latest American novels. “I am very much afraid that I shall never be able to satisfy you about the Last of the Mohicans,” Edgeworth wrote on April 20, 1826, “but it is early times with us yet—as we began it only last night.” The next day, she wrote an extra line between paragraphs before sending the letter: “April 21—Last night we got into the cavern that is a sublime scene—we begun to be much interested.”24 Edgeworth later made sure the novelist learned of her approval. “If Mr. Cooper, the author, is in London and is known to you,” she wrote to Albert Gallatin, “I beg you to make known to him my admiration of his Novels—The Last of the Mohicans especially is a most interesting and original work. I wish he would come to Ireland.”25 Provincial authors were deeply connected to each other through the transatlantic circulation of books, reading, literary influence, claims of artistic affinity, professional relationships, and friendship.
Scholars of American literature have often dismissed the first three decades of the nineteenth century either as a fall from the republicanism of the Revolutionary era into an insular and liberal nationalism or as a prelude to the more interesting productions of the antebellum period, when the rise of abolitionism, Jacksonian democracy, and the “American Renaissance” finally produced a literary culture worth our careful attention. In fact, this was a period in which a complex and influential provincial aesthetics emerged in concert with the wildly popular literatures of Ireland and Scotland. Irish and Scottish literary texts, especially those by Edgeworth and Scott, were among the most widely reprinted and highly respected works of the time. Nineteenth-century American literature begins with the thorough absorption of these provincial literatures. Everyone knows about Scott’s importance—if not Edgeworth’s—but few Americanists read their novels with the attention they initially received and still deserve, George Dekker’s The American Historical Romance (1987) notwithstanding.26 In attending to this, by way of the book trade, this study fills a chronological gap between two books that have done much to shape the debate about early American literature and print, Michael Warner’s The Letters of the Republic (1990) and Meredith McGill’s American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting (2003).27 I offer the notion of provinciality as a way to comprehend American literature’s constitutive entanglement with the print culture of the early nineteenth century and to highlight just how fundamentally transatlantic provinciality was.
Scholars of British literature have recently devoted their attention to the same Irish and Scottish authors whom Americanists have ignored. Romanticism itself—traditionally understood through the work of the six “great” English poets and now conceived more expansively to include all writing of the period (poetry and prose, by men and by women)—has been redefined to include specifically Irish and Scottish contributions to the history of the novel, the rise of cultural nationalism, and the aesthetics of empire.28 But the literary history of Britain makes little sense without also addressing the material presence and popularity of American literature, which flooded the British marketplace especially in the 1820s. It is time for British literary historians to follow the lead of Americanists and acknowledge the importance of transatlantic reprinting. At least six hundred American titles were reprinted in London between 1800 and 1840, long before the well-known successes of The Scarlet Letter (1850) and Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), including the works of Irving and Cooper and many texts by Charles Brockden Brown, Royall Tyler, Catherine Maria Sedgwick, John Neal, George Tucker, and Sarah Hale (see the Appendix)—and American literature was consistently reviewed in major British literary journals.29 This book’s focus on the importance of Irving’s and Cooper’s London editions begins a longer process of reconsidering other American writers whose works were published abroad. Irving’s and Cooper’s fraught provincial aesthetics contributed as much to Romantic-era notions of literary production as the literatures of the Celtic fringe.
More generally, London and the Making of Provincial Literature joins a growing scholarship devoted to connecting the history of material texts with a concern for aesthetics and literary form.30 An unprecedented number of literary scholars have embraced book history, a field inspired by the rise of digital media and the sense that we are currently experiencing a sea change in the history of communication akin to the invention of the printing press.31 Meanwhile, many literary critics, impatient with long-standing aversions to questions of aesthetic value, have proposed “a return to aesthetics” that has taken as many forms as there are meanings for the term aesthetics itself: a field of philosophical inquiry into a subject’s experience of nature and of the object of art, a rubric for discussing an artwork’s formal qualities, and a term for our politicized experience of the material world through our senses.32 Very few scholars interested in aesthetics use the empirical evidence that grounds book history (although only some have abandoned historicism altogether), while most literary scholars who have embraced book history shy away from questions of aesthetics.33 Yet provincial literature’s necessary struggle with the London book trade helped shape one of the period’s most pressing aesthetic questions: the place of “literature” in modernity. A new term, the aesthetics of provinciality, elaborated below, names the representational modes of Irish, Scottish, and American fiction that devised new theories of literature’s distinctiveness from the tense crucible of cultural subordination. It is ironic that one result of success in London was the creation of three myths about the rise of Irish, Scottish, and American literatures as independent national traditions. Provincial literature, in contrast, was radically dependent. A different irony follows from this: out of such dependence, such embroilment in the materiality of the marketplace, provincial authors fashioned a powerful vision of the independence of literary experience. In establishing a direct connection between the London-centered book trade and the development of modern aesthetic theory, I argue
