The purpose of this book is to read British and American literature comparatively. My argument will be that the development of American literature appears in a different light when read against the grain of British cultural imperatives, just as British literature itself reveals strange and unfamiliar aspects that are brought into play by the reflecting mirrors of American discourse. It is, by now, an academic commonplace to acknowledge how national ideals, and the “canonical” models of aesthetic expression that support them, should be seen as highly politicized entities, laden with ideological implications of all kinds. What may not be so...

The English poet most often seen as giving sustenance to the literature of early America is John Milton. According to Jay Fliegelman, Milton’s Adam became idealized in America as a heroic rebel against authority, while the quest in Paradise Lost to establish a human rather than divinely ordained Eden was seen as a correlative to the American impulse to escape British oppression.¹ This, of course, is to understand Milton as a poet of the sublime, a prophetic harbinger of freedom: “Milton’s great and distinguished excellence,” wrote Hugh Blair in 1784, was his “sublimity” Subsequently, George E Sensabaugh has described how,...

After his death in 1744, Pope’s influence lingered longer in America than in Britain. Developments in artistic fashion generally took longer to percolate from London to the provinces, so that for instance Nathaniel Evans (1742–67), a devotee of Popes work, only became conversant with poets of sensibility like William Collins and Thomas Gray when he visited England toward the end of his career.¹ Phillis Wheatley, who published her Poems on Various Subjects in 1773, also cited Pope as her conscious model, and, like the Twickenham poet, she manipulated her style of imitation to carve out for herself a rhetorical...

At the same time as the Connecticut Wits were drawing upon the hybrid characteristics of Pope to fashion their own epic vision of American independence, philosopher-statesmen like Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson were constructing narratives that would subsequently come to be understood as representative of the qualities of the new nation. In particular, Franklin’s Autobiography (begun in 1771, though not published until after the author’s death) and Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia (published privately in 1784–85 and publicly in 1787) have been seen as expressing an emerging nationalist consciousness, a sense of the United States as categorically...

To say Jefferson is a figure of the Enlightenment is to emphasize his intellectual affiliation with the skeptical, scientific, and empirical temper of the eighteenth century. Like Locke, Jefferson rejected any idealist notion of innate ideas. He found Plato nonsensical, disliked the emerging Romantic poets—Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron—and was worlds away from the transcendental rhetoric of Lincoln and Whitman that governed the Civil War era. The materialist impulses of this age of Enlightenment have often been a source of unease for later American intellectuals more at home in a tradition of liberal reformism, and, as May noted, Jefferson in...

It is not a truth universally acknowledged that Jane Austen’s most celebrated novels, with their polite representations of English life, were written at a time when Britain was at war with the United States. Tension between the two nations had been rumbling on since the American War of Independence in the 1780s, and conflict broke out again in earnest in June 1812, one year after the publication of Sense and Sensibility and one year before the appearance of Pride and Prejudice. Mansfield Park came out in 1814, at the height of these transatlantic hostilities, which were officially concluded in December...

The narratives of Washington Irving, like those of Jane Austen, appear in a different light if they are understood as reflecting the suppressed trauma of internecine conflict in the first generation after the American Revolution. To rotate Irving’s work through this particular axis is to elucidate unsettling new angles on a body of writing which, again like Austen’s, has too often been ethically domesticated, especially by critics drawing their assumptions from the values associated with national literary traditions constructed later in the nineteenth century. Melville, inspired in his early days with the energy of the “Young America” movement, quickly wrote...

The works of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Anthony Trollope have traditionally been seen as embodiments of their native literary traditions. Much of the best criticism on Hawthorne has emphasized ways in which his texts seek to engage with the most powerful ideas within American history and culture, from transcendentalist idealism (Matthiessen) through to liberalism (Bercovitch) or radical utopianism and the “National Symbolic” (Berlant).¹ None of these critics suggests that Hawthorne incorporates such notions in an unproblematic way of course, but they all imply that his fictions can hardly be understood except within the framework of particular contexts endemic to American culture....

Within the framework of what Philip Fisher calls “the new American Studies” as it has developed over recent years, the mam focus has gravitated toward the Civil War, rather than the Revolution, as the primary site for struggles over national idemitily and cultural tradition.¹ As we saw in the introduction, E O. Matthiessen’s American Renaissance, published in 1941, was pivotal to the initial establishment of American literary study as an academic enterprise, and the key terms in this work are “integrative” and “democratic.” Writing, like Emerson, in the “optative” mood, Matthiessen cherished his chosen authors as embodying a spirit of...