The Americans in the ‘English Men of Letters’

Abstract

Lowe’s essay turns to another entrepreneurial exercise in canonization, Macmillan’s ‘English Men of Letters’, a series of thirty-nine literary biographies that included Henry James’s critical biography of Nathaniel Hawthorne (1878), making James and Hawthorne the only two Americans represented in this ‘English’ series. With a focus on the publication history and contemporary reception of James’s biography, this chapter uncovers the rich intersection of two persistent cultural impulses: the expanding vision of the British literary tradition to include American authors and the backlash among exceptionalist American critics who insisted on literary independence. Though interconnections of the national literatures were taken for granted by this time, Lowe makes it clear that the precise relationships between them were still contested and fraught with anxieties. International ‘English’ was still very much a work in progress.