Abstract
This paper discusses the combative literary and cultural relations between the Old World of Europe and the New World of the United States. In analysing the use of irony within nineteenth-century renditions of the travelogue genre, I trace the transatlantic struggle as originating from an American post-colonial inferiority complex. By examining Washington Irving’s 1820 The Sketch-Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1860 text The Marble Faun, this paper will demonstrate the New World’s advent of creative autonomy and self-perceived artistic decolonisation of the European forbears’ traditions. I argue that within these texts, the subversion of the travelogue form enacts defiance of hegemonic European cultural assertion, producing literature that asserts its own existence and reflects the infant nation’s political inception. This paper additionally interrogates and evaluates the literary epoch of the American Renaissance and its imagined status as being the beginnings of American artistry.
Highlights
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In analysing the use of irony within nineteenth-century renditions of the travelogue genre, I trace the transatlantic struggle as originating from an American post-colonial inferiority complex
In 1888, Walt Whitman asserted the unoriginality of Washington Irving’s work, claiming that “Irving was suckled on the Addisonian-Oxford-Cambridge milk” (Whitman qtd. in Traubel 532)
Summary
Combative Transatlantic Literatures: An Analysis of Washington Irving’s The Sketch-Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun[1]. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1860 text The Marble Faun, this paper will demonstrate the New World’s advent of creative autonomy and self-perceived artistic decolonisation of the European forbears’ traditions. Employing a transatlantic postcolonial framework will be crucial to defending Irving and Hawthorne’s authorial originality Both texts are subversive: they subtly confront and undermine the European tradition, and the cultural snobbery it produces, to promote a American art. The “cunningly arranged” narrative teaches American writers how to subvert artistic hegemony and its oppressive forces (Hawthorne 353) It is the “public service” to which Ziff refers and autonomous American literature “finds its form and force because in it the cultural concerns of the new literary democracy find theirs” (xii). Within a transatlantic postcolonial framework, Whitman’s detection of unoriginality upon stating that “Irving was suckled on the Addisonian-Oxford-Cambridge milk” overlooks the metafiction inherent in the counter-discourse
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