American literature is typically seen as something that inspired
its own conception and that sprang into being as a cultural
offshoot of America's desire for national identity. But what of the
vast precedent established by English literature, which was a major
American import between 1750 and 1850?
In "The Importance of Feeling English," Leonard Tennenhouse
revisits the landscape of early American literature and radically
revises its features. Using the concept of transatlantic
circulation, he shows how some of the first American authors--from
poets such as Timothy Dwight and Philip Freneau to novelists like
William Hill Brown and Charles Brockden Brown--applied their
newfound perspective to pre-existing British literary models. These
American "re-writings" would in turn inspire native British authors
such as Jane Austen and Horace Walpole to reconsider their own
ideas of subject, household, and nation.
The enduring nature of these literary exchanges dramatically
recasts early American literature as a literature of diaspora,
Tennenhouse argues--and what made the settlers' writings distinctly
and indelibly American was precisely their insistence on
reproducing Englishness, on making English identity portable and
adaptable. Written in an incisive and illuminating style, "The
Importance of Feeling English" reveals the complex roots of
American literature, and shows how its transatlantic movement aided
and abetted the modernization of Anglophone culture at large.
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