Association Psychology and Literary Nationalism in the North American Review, 1815-1825

Abstract

EVER SINCE William B. Cairns, in I898, discerned what he called bumptiousness in American writing following the War of i8I2,' students have been seeking to define the nature and explain the causes of this nationalistic outburst. They have carefully catalogued its important features: the pleas for a termination of literary vassalage to England; the insistence on the excellence, for fictional and poetic purposes, of our early history and our present scenery; the running battle with unimpressed British travelers and reviewers; the trust in America's form of government as a guarantee of the utmost social happiness. This nationalistic surge has most frequently been explained in terms of political and social forces, such as anti-British feeling after the War of I8I2, or the natural combativeness of an expanding nation. There were compelling political and social reasons, of course, for insistence on nationalism in literature. Yet this sort of explanation does not tell the full story when one deals with critics who tried to base their arguments for nationalism on grounds which were firm both aesthetically and psychologically. An intellectual milieu, as well as Anglophobia and pride in the republic, was instrumental in shaping the views of some of the most zealous nationalists, those who wrote in the North American Review of Boston. These men, even when swept along in the stream of extraliterary forces, recognized a need to order their ideas in accordance with established patterns of critical thought. In the body of critical ideas current in New England in I8I5, they found plenty of justification for the belief that good literature must be nationalistic, that it must draw its materials and inspiration from a particular place and people. They were familiar, for example, with the idea that climatic milieu exerts an overriding influence on liter-