Literature, American Style. Ezra Tawil

      Introduction

      Style and the Cisatlantic

      We shall not cease from exploration

      And the end of all our exploring

      Will be to arrive where we started

      And know the place for the first time.

      —T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets

       Original Imitations

      Crèvecoeur’s epistolary regional narrative, Letters from an American Farmer (1782), is sometimes credited with the first embodiment of a distinctly American voice in its naïve narrator, Farmer James. Yet the work’s true founding gesture, ontologically prior to the invention of this narrative voice, is to imagine the offstage voice of James’s urbane British correspondent, whose letters are never represented, but against whose “refined style” the farmer repeatedly defines his own distinctly non-British voice: “However incorrect my style, however inexpert my methods, however trifling my observations may hereafter appear to you, assure yourself they will all be the genuine dictates of my mind…. I am neither a philosopher, politician, divine, or naturalist, but a simple farmer.”¹ What is hiding in plain sight here is simply this: Crèvecoeur needs British English in order to delineate his farmer’s more immediate, spontaneous, authentic, and American form of expression. This “British” voice is a rhetorical straw man, to be sure. But it is far more than that, for without this absent term of contrast, the “American” voice literally cannot speak. The simple fact that the latter is defined in a string of negative identifications—neither a this, nor a that, nor the other—further underscores the point. For the farmer’s style can only really be described in privative terms, as incorrect and inexpert. The logic so perfectly encapsulated here can be generalized across late eighteenth-century Anglo-American letters, where literary Americanness was quite literally being invented as a set of characteristics, not just incidentally distinct from Britishness but explicitly constructed in a differential relation to it, and in that sense, generated directly out of the British norms it claimed to leave behind.

      During the 1780s and 1790s, anglophone writers in the United States first began to claim that their writing incarnated “American” qualities. It was, at least in part, a kind of marketing slogan aimed at capturing a larger share of an increasingly competitive transatlantic literary market. Working in popular literary forms and modes already well established in Europe, these writers could offer recognizable and readable literary commodities; yet they also got to insist that they were creating something new and different. In the most basic terms, that newness had to do with their location on this side of the Atlantic Ocean. The condition of being “cis-Atlantic,” to use the awkward-sounding neologism Thomas Jefferson coined in 1782,² made it possible to claim that U.S. writing was infused with some distinct quality of “Americanness.” The only problem was, before authors could offer such a thing to readers, they would have to figure out what on earth it was. During the colonial period, Anglo-American authors had been far more interested in demonstrating their ability to write within a British tradition of belles lettres than in boasting of any distinctive characteristics associated with American subjectivity, geography, or social conditions.³ In fact, prior to around 1780, had such a phrase as “American literature” been used at all, it would most likely have been taken to refer to works