1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910778222203321

Autore

Tennenhouse Leonard <1942->

Titolo

The importance of feeling English [[electronic resource] ] : American literature and the British diaspora, 1750-1850 / / Leonard Tennenhouse

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Princeton ; ; Oxford, : Princeton University Press, c2007

ISBN

1-282-15773-6

9786612157738

1-4008-2792-2

Edizione

[Course Book]

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (170 p.)

Disciplina

810.9

Soggetti

American literature - English influences

American literature - Colonial period, ca. 1600-1775 - History and criticism

American literature - 1783-1850 - History and criticism

American literature - 19th century - History and criticism

Comparative literature - American and English

Comparative literature - English and American

National characteristics, English, in literature

Bellettrie

Wisselwerking

Verenigde Staten

Engeland

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Description based upon print version of record.

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Nota di contenuto

Diaspora and empire -- Writing English in America -- The sentimental libertine -- The heart of masculinity -- The Gothic in diaspora.

Sommario/riassunto

American literature is typically seen as something that inspired its own conception and that sprang into being as a cultural offshoot of America's desire for national identity. But what of the vast precedent established by English literature, which was a major American import between 1750 and 1850? In The Importance of Feeling English, Leonard Tennenhouse revisits the landscape of early American literature and



radically revises its features. Using the concept of transatlantic circulation, he shows how some of the first American authors--from poets such as Timothy Dwight and Philip Freneau to novelists like William Hill Brown and Charles Brockden Brown--applied their newfound perspective to pre-existing British literary models. These American "re-writings" would in turn inspire native British authors such as Jane Austen and Horace Walpole to reconsider their own ideas of subject, household, and nation. The enduring nature of these literary exchanges dramatically recasts early American literature as a literature of diaspora, Tennenhouse argues--and what made the settlers' writings distinctly and indelibly American was precisely their insistence on reproducing Englishness, on making English identity portable and adaptable. Written in an incisive and illuminating style, The Importance of Feeling English reveals the complex roots of American literature, and shows how its transatlantic movement aided and abetted the modernization of Anglophone culture at large.