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• W131069363 abstract "Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewLeonard Tennenhouse, The Importance of Feeling English: American Literature and the British Diaspora, 1750–1850 The Importance of Feeling English: American Literature and the British Diaspora, 1750–1850. Leonard Tennenhouse. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007. Pp. x+158.Paul GilesPaul GilesUniversity of Sydney Search for more articles by this author University of SydneyPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreFollowing on from The Imaginary Puritan (1992), a book he coauthored with Nancy Armstrong that influentially repositioned the early American novel on a transatlantic axis, Leonard Tennenhouse's The Importance of Feeling English examines the formative influence of what he calls “the British Diaspora” on American literature in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. After an opening chapter that considers theoretically issues of “Diaspora and Empire” (1), Tennenhouse discusses how the politics of language were played out around the time of the Revolution, with specific reference to ways in which Samuel Johnson and Noah Webster conceptualized the task of “writing English in America” (19). Chapter 3 then focuses upon the figure of the “sentimental libertine” (43) and analyses how American versions of seduction stories differed from their British counterparts, while chapter 4 looks at the transformation of the “man of feeling” into “the strong, silent type,” a “form of masculinity,” argues Tennenhouse, “that we now consider uniquely American” (91). In the final chapter, Tennenhouse discusses how gothic metaphors were represented in the literature of the early republic, taking issue in particular with Leslie Fiedler's nationalistic notion that the apparatus of medieval gothicism in novels such as Isaac Mitchell's The Asylum (1811) was, in Fiedler's term, “meaningless” (101). Tennenhouse argues instead for a version of “the gothic in diaspora” (94), whose valence derives not from local mimesis but from the transatlantic recirculation of aesthetic forms and genres.In general, Tennenhouse is very good on what he calls the “detours, disruptions, circularity, and exchanges” that keep “a diaspora alive and vital” (6) and that complicate the contours of generic transmission. He has written before on the theme of genre in Shakespeare, and this new book blends formal and historicist methodologies to show how the mutation of generic prototypes developed under different kinds of cultural conditions. He has many interesting things to say about Scottish influences on eighteenth-century American thought and culture, and in what is perhaps the most compelling section of the book he describes how the experience of Samuel Richardson's novels was significantly different for readers in America because of the way these epistolary fictions were reprinted in truncated forms that omitted letters dealing with issues of “interiority” (44). For commercial as well as cultural reasons, American reprints of Pamela (1740) and Clarissa (1747–48) tended to exclude the elements of psychological ambiguity that permeate the longer English versions of Richardson's novels, so that, as Tennenhouse notes, Susanna Rowson's Charlotte Temple at the end of the eighteenth century “fulfills precisely the cultural logic guiding the abridgments of the versions of Richardson that were preferred in America” (63). What makes chapter 3 so convincing is the detailed empirical work on editions of Richardson that Tennenhouse is able to adduce as evidence for his argument that Richardson was consumed and appropriated differently on either side of the Atlantic. By contrast, chapter 4, on the “man of feeling” (73), leaves its central hypothesis in a more tantalizing state, suggesting only that Jane Austen may have read the reprint of Brockden Brown's novel Clara Howard published by Minerva Press in 1807 under the title Philip Stanley: “Whether she actually read Philip Stanley during this period—and the likelihood is that she did, given that a Minerva lending library was within five miles of the Austen house—is less important than the fact of a fundamental shift in the kind of masculinity English readers and reviewers were prepared to receive” (84–85). Well, perhaps, but there are obviously more loose ends to this kind of argument, with the historical conditions of transmission being laid out rather sketchily. Indeed, in general terms this fairly short book is surprisingly light on historical grounding, preferring a distinctive theoretical trajectory with textual readings that trace parallels and extend the “diasporic” tradition of the American novel into the nineteenth century, through James Fenimore Cooper, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville. Again, Tennenhouse's primary interest is in genre and its transmission, its diachronic detours and crosscurrents, rather than in the more synchronic kinds of thick description that would seek to anchor texts in particular cultural situations.The strength of this critical approach lies in its capacity to make fascinating and unusual juxtapositions, to take Richardson or Timothy Dwight out of the matrix that usually circumscribes them within a rigid nationalist framework by reconsidering them within a more expansive sphere. Its correlative weakness, though, lies in its potential evisceration of social context and its tendency to dehistoricize cultural formations. For instance, Tennenhouse cites Gordon Wood's argument that the American “revolutionary leaders never intended to make a national revolution in any modern sense” (64), but any historian would acknowledge that the definitions and implications of national identity in the 1770s and 1780s were highly contested phenomena, not things easily reducible to descriptive fact. Similarly, Tennenhouse at times has a tendency to essentialize both Britain and America—contrasting, for example, “British distinctions of rank” with the “American ideal of contractualism” (83)—without acknowledging how in the late eighteenth century both sides were split, how there were enthusiasts for “rank” in America as well as advocates of “contractualism” in England. (Samuel Jackson Pratt's Emma Corbett; or, The Miseries of Civil War, published in England in 1780, offers an iconoclastic account of how these crossovers complicated the experience of the Revolutionary War for both parties, in its portrayal of an English gentleman who sympathizes with the cause of America politically but who suffers the loss of his son fighting for the British army on the American battlefield.) In this sense, the definition of “Englishness” at this time was a highly controversial topic: as J. G. A. Pocock and others have shown, what it meant to be “English” varied markedly according to political affiliation, and it is possible that Tennenhouse's notion of an English “diaspora,” and of Americans' affiliation to “the more fundamental British identity that tied them to their nation of origin” (2), has a tendency to gloss over the conflicts that accumulated around the question of just what this “fundamental British identity” consisted of. Tennenhouse usefully complicates questions of national affiliation by shifting its definition from birth and location to a more portable cultural construction: “Are you Anglo-American,” he asks, “because you are born of an English family, or are you Anglo-American because you live your life according to an English model?” (64). But the larger question of what this “English model” entails, and whether the composite term “Anglo-American” can usefully embrace its manifold contradictions and points of controversy, remains at times occluded. “Anglo-American” to Richard Price or Susanna Rowson meant one thing, but to Timothy Dwight or Samuel Johnson the term carried quite different overtones.Arguably, then, Tennenhouse's attempt to shift the cultural focus of transatlantic literature from “decolonization” to “diaspora” (3) risks overlooking the harsher tensions and social conflicts necessarily involved with such cultural transmissions of genre. In this sense, The Importance of Feeling English runs a risk endemic to methodologies of comparative literature, that of perpetuating forms of exceptionalism in a ghostly fashion by reifying different national traditions in order to reinforce the value of their mutual comparisons. Nevertheless, Tennenhouse's book does also gain considerable strength from the academic methods of comparative literature that are applied here in exemplary fashion to early American literature, as he draws upon a philosophical skepticism about any “single place of origin” (5) to displace the Americanist heritage from its provincial location and reorder it within a broader transatlantic context. In its excellent analysis of how American sentimentalism links up with older theories of cosmopolitanism, and in its reconsideration of how structural “differences” are integrated and accommodated within the parameters of early American literature (120), Tennenhouse's book makes an important contribution to expanding the circumference of the subject. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 108, Number 4May 2011 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/659339 Views: 20Total views on this site © 2011 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected] Crossref reports no articles citing this article." @default.
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• W131069363 title "Leonard Tennenhouse, The Importance of Feeling English: American Literature and the British Diaspora, 1750–1850The Importance of Feeling English: American Literature and the British Diaspora, 1750–1850. Leonard Tennenhouse. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007. Pp. x+158." @default.
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