The Literature of "British America"

Abstract

A decade and a half ago or so, William Spengemann inaugurated in these pages what has often since been called a sort of “revolution” in early American literary studies, as early Americanists have declared their independence from the bonds of (American) national literary history, and particularly from what has been called a “proto-nationalist” approach that would be beholden to explain how the literature of the thirteen colonies were the “origins” of American national literary history. One of the consequences of this declaration of independence has been that early American literature has once again become British—at least in the work of some early Americanists, who, inspired by social and political historians of early America, have begun to recontextualize colonial American writings within the literature of the British Empire. They hereby have been increasingly mindful of scholarship in early modern and eighteenth-century studies, while their colleagues in these fields, inspired by the postcolonial studies movement that swept through the humanities during the 1990s and early 2000s, have increasingly been interested in colonial writing. This critical turn among early Americanists should not be confused for a variant of the more recent trend toward “transnationalism” in American studies; rather, by shifting the context from “American” to “British,” the British Americanists have reinforced the notion of the nation as the organizing principle of literary studies. In fact, one of the recurring themes running through the books under consideration here is the notion that the colonial experience from the late sixteenth to the late eighteenth centuries was crucial in the formation not primarily of an American but rather of an English (or British) national identity and literature. Hence, these accounts of early America have placed renewed emphasis on the defining role played by the vernacular (English)