Review
Title: Literature, American Style: The Originality of Imitation in the Early Republic
Author: Ezra Tawil
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Genre: Literary history
Year Published: 2018
Number of Pages: 257
Binding: Cloth
ISBN: 9780812250374
Price: $75.00
Reviewed by Colby Townsend for the Association of Mormon Letters
Usually, when scholars of American literature describe what makes their subject unique, they rely on the popular notions of originality as laid out by the nineteenth-century work of authors like Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Melville wrote, for example, in 1850 that “it is better to fail in originality, than to succeed in imitation,” (5) cutting down the idea that good literature produced by Americans could or should rely on European precedents. While this may have been true for Melville and other Americans in the mid-to-late-nineteenth century, Ezra Tawil’s Literature, American Style: The Originality of Imitation in the Early Republic explores how this notion of originality was not shared by Anglo-American authors in the early national republic. Building on the work of several recent studies, Tawil focuses his attention on how early American authors believed that the uniqueness and originality of American letters lay in a new style unique to the American experience. To do this, Tawil highlights how most, if not all, of what early American authors argued made their writing unique was actually based on European literary precedents: “the very idea of American literary novelty was not something new under the sun but rather a particular spin on cultural developments that originate elsewhere and have a long European literary history” (3).
So, what then makes up this “originality of imitation”? Early American literature viewed itself in a paradoxical relationship with British literature. According to Tawil, this disconnect with British norms “was not really a cultural “disaffiliation”; it would be more accurate to theorize it as an inverted form of affiliation” (12) particularly because “post-revolutionary literary culture was shaped more profoundly by the realities of transatlantic exchange than by the desire for national isolation” (13). American literature sought to become its own thing while tacitly recognizing its large debt to British letters, unlike later authors of the nineteenth century. Tawil’s aim, then, is to explore this early national culture through the concept of “style” and define what this meant for early Anglo-American authors in their own time and place, not as part of a trajectory toward the mid-nineteenth century changes in the understanding of style and originality. Tawil succeeds in this remarkably well throughout each chapter of the book.
Over the course of an introduction, four chapters, and a coda at the end, Tawil covers a broad range of topics in early American literature. In chapter one he explores Noah Webster’s “Americanization” of the English language and its English precursors in the centuries prior to his work. Rather than coming up with “American” spellings like color (as opposed to the British “colour”), Webster was anticipated by several previous lexicographers in English literature that argued for the same or very similar revisions to the English language. In chapter two Tawil describes the fascinating yet awkward reality that the “original” American voice of Crévecoeur’s Farmer James in his Letters of an American Farmer were authored not by a poor, uneducated farmer as presented in the text but an American naturalized Frenchman of minor nobility who wrote the Letters in England in 1782 after he left America before the end of the Revolutionary War. Rather than being written purely in plain-style, Crévecoeur’s Letters often incorporate literary turns more like a nobleman than a humble farmer. These chapters highlight the strong dependence on British and European literary norms of these two early American writers even though both presented their work as uniquely American. For Crévecoeur, as for many Anglo-American authors of the early national republic, it was the geography of America and its situation that instilled this uniqueness. “The very didacticism of that narrative voice thus bears witness to the fact that, while the farmer has been cultivating the land, the land has been cultivating him. This is the central argument of the work…” (104).
In chapter three this landscape becomes central for Charles Brockden Brown’s writings. Tawil describes one of Brown’s gothic romances, Edgar Huntly, Or, Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker (1799), as, “using putatively distinctive features of an American landscape to announce the arrival of a distinctively American literature” (133). Yet, this focus on the aesthetic nature of American geography also has its ties to eighteenth-century Europe and Tawil reminds scholars to not confuse these important historical connections for “later forms of cultural nationalism” (133). Instead, they should be connected to the aesthetic traditions that formed the backbone of much of Ann Radcliffe’s novels, for example, especially The Mysteries of Otranto (1794) and The Italian (1797). Anyone who has read these books is familiar with the long, detailed tangents describing the lush European landscapes in the middle of telling a gothic story about castles, hauntings, and ghosts. Brown was steeped in these cultural developments and utilized what he learned from them to describe the American “‘wilderness’ settings rather than cultivated landscapes” (135). This wildness and rigidity of the landscape, as Tawil shows throughout this volume, comes to be a crucial part of the early American understanding of originality.
In chapter four Tawil further examines what scholars have come to understand as American style by closely scrutinizing plain-style writing in early American literature, particularly in sentimental novels of seduction. Tawil responds to the previous work of Perry Miller—the giant of early American literary and religious history of twentieth-century scholarship—and finds that while he does not agree with Miller that plain-style was the “presiding rule of American prose,” (150) it did obtain a significant place in American literary culture. While the Christian plain-style writing had been a long and developed tradition in Western culture, the way that it was appropriated by early Anglo-American authors is specific to its time and place. This is again evidence of American borrowing of European precursors and relied heavily upon, quoting Michelle Burnham, “the intertwined developments of mercantile capitalism and transcontinental colonialism that fostered and supported New World travel” (236, nt. 13). Tawil identifies author Samuel Richardson as having, “more influentially than any other figure, brought the Puritan ethos of plainspoken virtue into the sentimental story of seduction” (159). This would have lasting impacts on the style and form of early American literature.
The reader may wonder as they conclude the Literature, American Style, what, if anything, then is unique about American literature? Almost one hundred years ago scholars, mainly through the work of D. H. Lawrence and John Macy, began to debate this exact question. Lawrence’s argument, that there was something “happened to the English stock” (182) that had been planted in America’s wilderness where something entirely new sprung up out of the ground that was distinct from its British precursors, has its evidence and its limits. Macy’s argument, that American literature is simply a branch of English literature like that written in Scotland or South Africa (182), likewise has suggestive evidence in early American history to support its argument while also not accounting for all the evidence. Tawil’s study intervenes between these two opposing scholarly traditions to argue that both ideas were present in early Anglo-American literature. He successfully finds evidence throughout the volume that supports both while remaining far from American exceptionalism and invites scholars to probe further the inherent transatlanticism of the literature of the early national United States. This is an impressive feat, and scholars and those interested in understanding the style of early American literature will benefit greatly from this book.