The Importance of Feeling English: American Literature and the British Diaspora, 1750-1850. By Leonard Tennenhouse. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007. xii, 158 pp. $35.00, ISBN 978-0-691-09681-0.)

Abstract

Leonard Tennenhouse builds on recent scholarship on early American writing—postcolonial, transatlantic, and book history—to argue, against conventional wisdom, that early U.S. culture did not break from English culture so much as perpetuate it with a twist. “American” identity emerged by enabling Britons in North America to continue to “feel” English. The concept of a British diaspora structures the book's central assumptions: that novels and poetry (reading tastes as well as literary production) offer unique insights into cultural transmission and change; that American reading and writing should be mapped within transatlantic circulation; and that motivations for such literary habits derived from the threat of being culturally cut off from the mother country. The argument unfolds via close readings of British and American texts from John Locke and George Berkeley to Nathaniel Hawthorne, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Herman Melville, with much of the book dwelling on the federal era and early republic. Some explanations are more explicitly situated vis-à-vis book history than others: this is particularly true of the original, provocative examinations of the American reception of Samuel Richardson's novels. The Atlantic flow reverses in the case of Charles Brockden Brown's 1801 novel, Clara Howard, which Tennenhouse reads as a revision of Henry Mackenzie's The Man of Feeling (1771) to talk about American variations on the cult of sensibility; he then carefully considers the 1807 London edition of Brown's novel, which he imagines Jane Austen borrowing from her local Minerva Press lending library. (Austen's male characters, he argues, are more closely aligned to a new American masculinity than to Mackenzie's or other eighteenth-century English models.) These close readings of literary texts aim to illustrate the significance of translatio studii—the “transfer of learning and the arts, or cultural authority, to [a] new imperial center” (p. 13), the process by which British Americans maintained English cultural identity and reciprocally affected the London metropole, even as they become newly American. Rather than simply imitating British culture, these authors engaged in “the transformative process of repetition, with a difference” (p. 128).