Reviewed by: Literature, American Style: The Originality of Imitation in the Early Republic by Ezra Tawil Thomas Koenigs (bio) Literature, American Style: The Originality of Imitation in the Early Republic ezra tawil University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018 257 pp. Ezra Tawil’s Literature, American Style traces the transatlantic origins of American literary exceptionalism. The initially counterintuitive, but persuasive, insight at the center of this book is that many of the earliest and most influential arguments for the distinctiveness of American literature were deeply indebted to European, and especially English, aesthetic theories and literary modes. This central argument has a revelatory obviousness to it: when one thinks about it, it is not especially surprising that claims to American originality had European precedents and origins. “Of course,” says the twenty-first-century scholar steeped in recent transatlantic and hemispheric accounts of early US literature, “this idea would have transatlantic origins!” The fact that no one has thought or written about this fact [End Page 245] in a sustained way before, however, suggests the incredible power—even as it has been variously debunked—of the very cultural fantasy of literary Americanness that Tawil analyzes. Literature, American Style undertakes a significant methodological revision in the study of American literature’s distinctiveness by shifting focus from the originality or derivativeness of early US literature to the (much) longer intellectual and literary histories that underpinned the conceptions of originality embraced by these works. Literature, American Style’s accounts of such histories are impressive for both their scope and detail, as Tawil often traces a given aesthetic theory or literary style back to such distant figures as Chaucer, Augustine, or the Ancients, while also tracking how such ideas circulated in the early Republic. Tawil is well aware that a book focused on “what makes American literature American” risks seeming (at best) old-fashioned or (at worst) complicit in the exceptionalism that is its subject. He makes clear at the outset that his ambitions are genealogical: Literature, American Style does not aspire to evaluate the accuracy of early national claims to literary distinctiveness, but to trace and analyze the “fantasy of national originality” (33). One of this book’s significant achievements is to put two opposed lines of criticism—accounts of American literature’s distinctiveness and the transatlantic approaches to American literature that have revised such studies— into a compelling conversation with each other. Literature, American Style argues that neither the venerable “Anglophobia thesis”—the idea that early US culture emerged out of a desire to distance and distinguish itself from Britain—nor the more recent “Anglophilia thesis”—the idea that early US culture is best understood as an attempt to reproduce English culture outside England—can fully capture what Tawil calls the “inverted form of affiliation” that defined early US culture: the very terms on which American writers made their claims to national originality were themselves largely borrowed from British culture. In Tawil’s account, American claims to literary originality “sutured the fantasy of autochthony to the reality of allochthony” by arguing that Englishness itself had been transformed by the American setting (17). This reconceptualization of national literary originality depends on re-framing the question in two distinct, but related, ways. First, Tawil shifts the historical focus from the familiar manifestos of literary nationalism of the 1840s and ’50s to the comparatively “quaint” declarations of national originality from the 1780s and ’90s. This not only allows Literature, American [End Page 246] Style to offer a fresh prehistory of this crucial later moment, but also, far more interestingly, enables it to recover the alternative, less familiar conceptions of literary originality that we often miss because of our own comfort with the conception of originality that predominated in the antebellum period and beyond. Literature, American Style highlights a pre-Romantic conception of originality as repetition with difference rather than radically new or unprecedented creation. The idea of an “original imitation” might seem profoundly paradoxical to modern readers, but, as Tawil convincingly shows, this is exactly how early US writers understood the process of creating a distinctive American literature: they sought to achieve national originality by adapting English materials to the American context. This shift in historical focus is intimately...