LEADER 04341nam 22005415 450 001 9910793023503321 005 20190516114113.0 010 $a0-8122-9529-3 024 7 $a10.9783/9780812295290 035 $a(CKB)4100000006370905 035 $a(MiAaPQ)EBC5472953 035 $a(DE-B1597)502047 035 $a(OCoLC)1044756750 035 $a(DE-B1597)9780812295290 035 $a(EXLCZ)994100000006370905 100 $a20190516d2018 fg 101 0 $aeng 135 $aurcnu|||||||| 181 $ctxt$2rdacontent 182 $cc$2rdamedia 183 $acr$2rdacarrier 200 10$aLiterature, American Style $eThe Originality of Imitation in the Early Republic /$fEzra Tawil 205 $aFirst edition. 210 1$aPhiladelphia : $cUniversity of Pennsylvania Press, $d[2018] 210 4$d©2018 215 $a1 online resource (268 pages) 311 $a0-8122-5037-0 320 $aIncludes bibliographical references and index. 327 $tFrontmatter -- $tCONTENTS -- $tIntroduction. Style and the Cisatlantic -- $tChapter 1. To Form a More Perfect Language: Noah Webster's American-Style English -- $tChapter 2. Transatlantic Correspondences: Crèvecoeur and the Incorrect Style -- $tChapter 3. "New Forms of Sublimity": Charles Brockden Brown and the Irregular Style -- $tChapter 4. "Homespun Habits": Seduction, Sentiment, and the Artless Style -- $tCoda. Stock and Soil -- $tNotes -- $tIndex -- $tAcknowledgments 330 $aBetween 1780 and 1800, authors of imaginative literature in the new United States wanted to assert that their works, which bore obvious connections to anglophone literature on the far side of the Atlantic, nevertheless constituted a properly "American" tradition. No one had yet figured out, however, what it would mean to write like an American, what literature with an American origin would look like, nor what literary characteristics the elusive quality of Americanness could generate. Literature, American Style returns to this historical moment-decades before the romantic nationalism of Cooper, the transcendentalism of Emerson and Thoreau, or the iconoclastic poetics of Whitman-when a fantasy about the unique characteristics of U.S. literature first took shape, and when that notion was linked to literary style.While late eighteenth-century U.S. literature advertised itself as the cultural manifestation of a radically innovative nation, Ezra Tawil argues, it was not primarily marked by invention or disruption. In fact, its authors self-consciously imitated European literary traditions while adapting them to a new cultural environment. These writers gravitated to the realm of style, then, because it provided a way of sidestepping the uncomfortable reality of cultural indebtedness; it was their use of style that provided a way of departing from European literary precedents. Tawil analyzes Noah Webster's plan to reform the American tongue; J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur's fashioning of an extravagantly naïve American style from well-worn topoi; Charles Brockden Brown's adaptations of the British gothic; and the marriage of seduction plots to American "plain style" in works such as Susanna Rowson's Charlotte Temple and Hannah Webster Foster's The Coquette. Each of these works claims to embody something "American" in style yet, according to Tawil, remains legible only in the context of stylistic, generic, and conceptual forms that animated English cultural life through the century. 606 $aNational characteristics, American, in literature 606 $aNationalism and literature$zUnited States 606 $aAmerican literature$y1783-1850$xHistory and criticism 606 $aEnglish language$zUnited States$xStyle 606 $aEnglish language$zUnited States$xOrthography and spelling$xHistory$y18th century 615 0$aNational characteristics, American, in literature. 615 0$aNationalism and literature 615 0$aAmerican literature$xHistory and criticism. 615 0$aEnglish language$xStyle. 615 0$aEnglish language$xOrthography and spelling$xHistory 676 $a810.935873 700 $aTawil$b Ezra, $0603561 801 0$bDE-B1597 801 1$bDE-B1597 906 $aBOOK 912 $a9910793023503321 996 $aLiterature, American Style$93776755 997 $aUNINA