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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.

American independence was inevitable by 1780, but British writers spent the several decades following the American Revolution transforming their former colonists into something other than estranged British subjects. Christopher Flynn's engaging and timely book systematically examines for the first time the ways in which British writers depicted America and Americans in the decades immediately following the revolutionary war. Flynn documents the evolution of what he regards as an essentially anthropological, if also in some ways familial, interest in the former colonies and their citizens on the part of British writers. Whether Americans are idealized as the embodiments of sincerity and virtue or anathematized as intolerable and ungrateful louts, Flynn argues that the intervals between the acts of observing and writing, and between writing and reading, have the effect of distancing Britain and America temporally as well as geographically. Flynn examines a range of canonical and noncanonical works-sentimental novels of the 1780s and 1790s, prose and poetry by Wollstonecraft, Blake, Coleridge, and Wordsworth; and novels and travel accounts by Smollett, Lennox, Frances Trollope, and Basil Hall. Together, they offer a complex and revealing portrait of Americans as a breed apart, which still resonates today. Christopher Flynn is an assistant professor of English literature at St. Edward's University in Austin, Texas, USA. Contents: Introduction: America and the question of time; English novels on the American Revolution; English reforms in American settings: Utopian scenes and the idea of America; Savagery and civility: states of nature and the quest for natural man; A breed apart: the traveler as ethnographer; Conclusion; Bibliographer; Index.

This essay argues for Phillis Wheatley and Scipio Moorhead as early contributors to the tradition of Black Ekphrasis. This essay frames \"To S.M. [Scipio Moorhead], a Young African Painter, on Seeing his Works,\" as both an instance and a theorization of Black Ekphrasis. Wheatley's commentary leads to a consideration of the painter and poet's bond under the tyranny of slavery. By way of the Damon-Pythias myth, Wheatley links Black Ekphrasis to the collective pursuit of freedom.

How and why did the life and music of Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827) matter to experimental writers in the early twentieth century? Previous answers to this question have tended to focus on structural analogies between musical works and literary texts, charting the many different ways in which poetry and prose resemble Beethoven’s compositions. This book takes a different approach. It focuses on how early twentieth-century writers—chief among them E. M. Forster, Aldous Huxley, Wyndham Lewis, Dorothy Richardson, Rebecca West, and Virginia Woolf—profited from the representational conventions associated in the nineteenth century and beyond with Beethovenian culture. The emphasis of Moonlighting falls for the most part on how modernist writers made use of Beethovenian legend. It is concerned neither with formal similarities between Beethoven’s music and modernist writing nor with the music of Beethoven per se, but with certain ways of understanding Beethoven’s music which had long before 1900 taken shape as habit, myth, cliché, and fantasy, and with the influence they had on experimental writing up to 1930. Moonlighting suggests that the modernists drew knowingly and creatively on the conventional. It proposes that many of the most experimental works of modernist literature were shaped by a knowing reliance on Beethovenian consensus; in short, that the literary modernists knew Beethovenian legend when they saw it, and that they were eager to profit from it.

Future History analyzes English and American writings that imagine England on a global stage well before England became an empire or the United States became a global power. Through close readings, historical contextualization, application of archival theory, and careful speculation, the book traces the ways that English and American writers imagined the East Indies and the West Indies as interconnected. The book argues that the earliest expressions of an American or English worldview were born colonial, conceived at the margins of a rising empire, not in its metropolis, and that a wider variety of agents than we have previously understood—Algonquian converts, “reformed” Catholics, enslaved women in the spice trade, Protestant dissidents, West Indian maroons—helped shape that worldview. In order to recover these voices and experiences, so often overwritten or ignored, the book combines more traditional methodologies of literary analysis and historicization with an interrogation of the structures of the archives in which early writings have been preserved. The chapters taken together describe a particular global (East Indies–West Indies) literary history, while the codas, taken as a separate sequence, demonstrate how a “slant” view on literary history that is asynchronous and at times anachronistic affords a new and more inclusive view of the worlding of the English imagination in the seventeenth century.

The captivity narrative has always been a literary genre associated with America. Joe Snader argues, however, that captivity narratives emerged much earlier in Britain, coinciding with European colonial expansion, the development of anthropology, and the rise of liberal political thought. Stories of Europeans held captive in the Middle East, America, Africa, and Southeast Asia appeared in the British press from the late sixteenth through the late eighteenth centuries, and captivity narratives were frequently featured during the early development of the novel. Until the mid-eighteenth century, British examples of the genre outpaced their American cousins in length, frequency of publication, attention to anthropological detail, and subjective complexity. Using both new and canonical texts, Snader shows that foreign captivity was a favorite topic in eighteenth-century Britain. An adaptable and expansive genre, these narratives used set plots and stereotypes originating in Mediterranean power struggles and relocated in a variety of settings, particularly eastern lands. The narratives' rhetorical strategies and cultural assumptions often grew out of centuries of religious strife and coincided with Europe's early modern military ascendancy.Caught Between Worldspresents a broad, rich, and flexible definition of the captivity narrative, placing the American strain in its proper place within the tradition as a whole. Snader, having assembled the first bibliography of British captivity narratives, analyzes both factual texts and a large body of fictional works, revealing the ways they helped define British identity and challenged Britons to rethink the place of their nation in the larger world.

Reading the American Novel 1780-1865 provides valuable insights into the evolution and diversity of fictional genres produced in the United States from the late 18th century until the Civil War, and helps introductory students to interpret and understand the fiction from this popular period. Offers an overview of early fictional genres and introduces ways to interpret them today Features in depth examinations of specific novels Explores the social and historical contexts of the time to help the readers' understanding of the stories Explores questions of identity - about the novel, its 19th-century readers, and the emerging structure of the United States - as an important backdrop to understanding American fiction Profiles the major authors, including Louisa May Alcott, Charles Brockden Brown, James Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Harriet Beecher Stowe, alongside less familiar writers such as Fanny Fern, Caroline Kirkland, George Lippard, Catharine Sedgwick, and E. D. E. N. Southworth Selected by Choice as a 2013 Outstanding Academic Title

Taking as a case study Sir Walter Ralegh's The Discoverie of Guiana (1596), an account of Ralegh's search for gold in South America, this essay argues that European ventures in early America required a mode of speculative thinking and deployment of nonreferential truth claims that Catherine Gallagher identifies as the hallmarks of \"novelistic fictionality.\" Early American exploration narratives such as Ralegh's, then, perform the \"rise of fictionality\" over a century before the eighteenth-century British novel takes shape. Ralegh's initial descriptions of El Dorado, which he inherits from second- and thirdhand accounts, would seem to reflect the tradition of \"marvellous\" New World travel writing that had been present in English literature since Thomas More's Utopia (1516), but as the narrative progresses, Ralegh's description of the Amazon region increasingly draws on financial and sexual metaphors of \"credit\" intended to make the expedition more imaginable for the reader, and in particular to solicit the patronage of Queen Elizabeth I. In several key instances, Ralegh fails to offer proof that gold is present, but nonetheless entertains the existence of gold in Guiana as a way to understand interactions with South American Natives that would otherwise be inscrutable. As a result, Ralegh's descriptions of gold mines he claims to have discovered, and even the ostentatious idea of El Dorado that he inherited from other European accounts, become easier for the reader to accept as a potential future reality. The figure of the gold thus operates much like Gallagher's formulation of the fictional novelistic character, an ontological vacancy which allows the reader to appropriate \"nobody's story\" as their own.

The point of departure of this essay is that seaside resort towns and hotels function as in-between, liminal spaces for visitors, while the unknown, boundless, and mysterious sea often acquires a metaphorical meaning as a symbol of monsters, madness, death, desire, and the unconscious. Thus, the liminal space of the seaside serves as an appropriate setting that facilitates self-realization. The three novels selected for study here are set in British seaside towns in the 1960s-1970s, and present their respective protagonists’ struggle with their past memories and traumas. In Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach (2007), the newlyweds get a chance of selfunderstanding, however, they fail at communicating their fears and desires. Ultimately, the seaside remains a symbol of misunderstandings and trauma as well as the dividing line between the times before and after the sexual revolution of the 1960s. By contrast, the protagonists in Stanley Middleton’s novel, Holiday (1974), and Iris Murdoch’s The Sea, The Sea (1978) achieve self-awareness through either a time-travel that allows for re-living the past or a journey to the unconscious, respectively. Nevertheless, these novels also end on an ambiguous tone, and the question whether real self-understanding has been attained remains open.

This essay examines the impact of the eighteenth century's developing rhetoric of racial difference on Protestant attitudes toward the religious salvation of Africans across the Atlantic world. As English colonies passed legislation that widened the legal and social gap between blacks and whites, missionaries and theologians called for more robust and wide-ranging efforts to evangelize African men and women. I show how speculation into the fate of bodies of color in the afterlife helped some Protestant authors navigate this apparently contradictory situation. Reading the work of two Massachusetts puritans (Samuel Sewall and Cotton Mather), and one Connecticut Anglican associated with the English Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (John Beach), I demonstrate that the fine details of these writers' eschatological and millennial schemes often belied their overt insistence that ethnic distinctions would be entirely transcended in the world to come. Each suggested, in his own way, that it was impossible to imagine that a resurrected body could be black, thereby underlining the subordinate status of Christians of color during mortal life.