Introduction: British and American genres
Eve Tavor Bannet and Susan Manning
Anglophone literary scholarship with a transatlantic inflection or focus has become increasingly prominent during the past
fifteen or twenty years. The emerging field has been surveyed, subdivided, argued over, theorized, and institutionalized in
new journals and degree programs, as well as in learned societies and landmark texts. Like parallel developments in Atlantic
history and oceanic geography, transatlantic literary studies have been hailed as innovatory, radical, and “postnational” – and almost
as quickly declared parochial, linguistically imperialist, or otherwise politically suspect. With the advent of Hemispheric
and Global literary studies, some have been tempted into even broader and less easily generalizable spaces. But there are
compelling historical, methodological, and literary reasons for keeping a spotlight on Anglophone transatlantic literary exchanges
during the period covered by this book – not least of which is that transatlantic relations were so central to Britons’ and
Americans’ everyday lives, literary imaginations, and histories, and that so much primary recovery work of sources and contacts
remains to be done. In this volume of essays we have therefore enlisted scholars from both sides of the Atlantic both to take
stock and to address anew what are at present the principal issues and topics in seventeenth- to early nineteenth-century
Anglophone transatlantic literary studies. The area is large in every sense, and stringent principles of selection have been
necessary to produce a book that, we hope, will be readable, informative, and generate further work. In this introduction
we lay out the grounds for transatlantic connections and explain the rationale for the essays’ inclusion and approach.
Even before seventeenth-century English settlement on the eastern seaboard, the history and cultural imagination of English
speakers was entwined with the idea of a “new world” of material, social, and erotic promise. “Oh my America, My new found
land!” John Donne eulogized his mistress. As Wil Verhoeven argues below, between More’s
Utopia and Charles Brockden Brown, on both sides of the ocean, utopian
America-centered “mythmaking” continued to color the era’s empiricism and to shape political arguments among British and American
Whigs and Tories. Britain and America were linked, as much as anything else, by what Joel Pace calls “Imag-I-Nations.” They
were also linked more prosaically by people on the move. Alongside successive waves of emigration
which Britons feared would depopulate the kingdom, these included visitors and sojourners of all kinds. There were Americans
visiting Britain for purposes of education or trade, as agents of provincial assemblies, refugees from wars and revolution
s, or emissaries from the new Republic. American Indians made the crossing to see the British king, to raise money for Indian
schools, or to make their voices heard. African slaves
were carried to Britain by their American or West Indian masters, some remaining as free citizens. British servants, commercial
factors, Christian missionaries, and government officials and their families stayed some years in America and returned. Mariners,
travelers, soldiers, and fortune-seekers passed through, while British actors and theatrical troupes went out for longer or
shorter tours in American theatre
s. On land and at sea in this multination
al Atlantic world, Britons and Americans repeatedly encountered others who resisted incorporation, even as they were themselves
unwillingly incorporated through captivity in the societies of others. British and American treatment of others and by others
was a key part of transatlantic experiences, and, increasingly, of violent differences and debate.
People brought back stories. Many more than we might expect also wrote. Materially and institutionally, ordinary Britons and
Americans were linked by the ocean and its ships
, by the letter post, and by a lively transatlantic print
culture. As Richard Sher demonstrates, during the course of the eighteenth century, “America was transformed into a provincial
centre of Anglophone print culture,” which preserved two-way links with Britain even after the Revolution, not only thanks
to the importation into America of printed British books, but also by virtue of the longstanding, and far more flexible, transatlantic
reprint trade. As Carla Mulford and Jim Egan point out, Americans conceived of the works they wrote in America as participating
in English literature, even as they declared the particularity of their experiences and the difference in the conditions of
their writing. Cotton Mather published his
Magnalia Christi Americana in London and read British reviews of the book; about 150 years later, American writers such as Royall Tyler, Charles Brockden
Brown, James Fenimore Cooper, and Washington Irving continued to be reprinted in Britain, just as British writers such as
Robert Burns, Maria Edgeworth, and Walter Scott continued to be reprinted in America. Considered through the lens
of literature, then, the political independence of the American colonies was not so much a severing of ties as the renegotiation
of a relationship. Britons and Americans had written to each other, and about each other, in their literary works before 1776;
and they continued to do so afterwards. However strident their national feelings, Anglophone writers continued to be concerned
with transatlantic issues, just as they continued to inhabit a changing, but ever-powerful matrix of continuity and dissonance.
This primary and multi-faceted relationship evolved and persisted until after the American Civil War and arguably until the
end of World War I in 1918, despite being increasingly dissipated by the impact of other cultural and political forces. Before
about 1830, however, Anglophone lines of transatlantic circulation and exchange dominated in both Britain and America; during
this period, connections and differences can be described with some precision across a variety of literary domains.
The organizing principle of the essays in this collection is genre
because – like people and with them – genres travel. In Derrida’s punning formulation, genres are a passe-partout. Like the
mat surrounding a painting (passepartout), generic conventions set off, frame, and serve as a base or backing for individual
works, differentiating recognizable units of discourse from the wealth of surrounding language. At the same time, genres pass
everywhere like a passport, carrying a changing variety of hybrid contents with them like a
portemanteau. Genres traverse seas and oceans, pass through ports and across ethnic frontiers, national boundaries, and local distinctions
of gender
and class
, to weave their circuitous way over diverse linguistic and cultural territories.
1 As the contributors to this volume demonstrate, genres traveled in exemplary ways across such dividing lines in the British-American
Atlantic world from the seventeenth to the early nineteenth century, moving back and forth across the ocean innumerable times
and carrying diverse contents with them as they went. Both before and after the American Declaration of Independence in 1776,
Britons and Americans, women and men, enslaved African, American, and British captives, liminal white, red, and black voyagers,
“highbrow” and “lowbrow” writers, and religious groups of different denominations deployed the same literary genres on both
sides of the Atlantic. They did so to pass on their distinctive ideas and experiences, and to enable these to pass muster
elsewhere – in a different linguistic, ethnic, national, economic, or cultural community, in different historical and social
circumstances, in different parts of the New or Old World.
Long-lived as they generally were, genres in this period might therefore be described as a sort of transatlantic lingua franca:
a common language
joining people/s across distance and difference and contributing (in Benedict Anderson’s terms) to the process by which contemporaries
on different sides of the ocean were able to imagine themselves as one transatlantic Anglophone community.
2 But this would be only half the story. For, as Robert Miles argues below in his chapter on transatlantic Gothic, the lingua
franca of genre
is most accurately viewed, not in classical structuralist terms as a set of “inert” and largely invariable formulae “into
which individual works will naturally slot,” but as a highly dynamic “kind of narrative language with common semantic and
syntactic elements,” which did not have identical meaning in all “individual acts of parole,” and which themselves always
remained “contingent and therefore subject to history
.” In other words, once generic recurrences are considered empirically in transatlantic terms, cultural difference, historical
change, uncertain meaning, and singularity come to the fore. Thus, while arguing that providence tales, spiritual
autobiographies, and tales of wonder followed similar narrative structures and obeyed the same interpretative rules on both
sides of the Atlantic from the early seventeenth to the late eighteenth centuries, Jim Egan shows how these narrative structures
and interpretative rules were applied by different factions of the same seventeenth-century New England Puritan community
to parse its shared history in mutually contradictory ways, and portray the same persons and events in diametrically opposite
fashion. He thus demonstrates the equivocation even of fixed narrative elements considered in themselves, and their unexpected
flexibility in the hands of different writers, even within the same geographical and ideological community. Miles makes a
similar point transatlantically by showing how Charles Brockden Brown reused and recast narrative elements of Godwinian Gothic
in
Wieland, and how Godwin in turn subsequently reused and recast narrative elements of
Wieland in his novel,
Mandeville. Here generic repetition and difference not only gave each writer his singular voice, but became a vehicle for transatlantic
dialogue.
Transatlantic dialogue and the simultaneously historical and individual contingency of generic elements also come to the fore
in Lise Sorensen’s chapter on the captivity narrative. Sorensen returns the captivity narrative from its twentieth-century
status as “a unique American genre” to its dynamic transatlantic history, by canvassing the growing body of scholarship which
explores how the early English Barbary captivity narrative morphed into the American Indian captivity narrative in the hands
of early American settlers, only to be revived in the new Republic to address the depredations of Barbary pirates on American
ships at the turn of the nineteenth century; and how the American captivity narrative, in turn,
evolved into sentimental “captivity romance
s” in America and into a component of the mixed genre
of the novel on both sides of the Atlantic. Sorensen focuses on Susanna Rowson’s use of this highly flexible transatlantic
genre in her late eighteenth-century play
Slaves in Algiers, and novel,
Reuben and Rachel, to argue that Rowson was deploying generic elements from captivity narratives
within a “transatlantic imaginary”
after American Independence in order to “enable estranged Americans and Britons to [re]discover their shared national characteristics
and racial genealogy,” and to “offer reconciliatory narrative possibilities.”
As John Frow has remarked in another context, genres do not travel in a vacuum without material support. They are physically
or ceremonially “framed,” and transmitted, altered, mixed, and transported by a variety of vehicles produced in a variety
of institutional settings.
3 The institution which did more than any other to disseminate genres across distance and dividing lines in the Atlantic world
during this period was undoubtedly the print
shop. Following Rick Sher’s account of the transatlantic book trade, several chapters concern themselves with how the culture
and practices of printers
in the transatlantic trade affected the transmission and adaptation of genres. Arguing that newspapers and magazines were
cheaper, easier to transport, and far more widely read than books, and that American colonists not only imported and reprinted
material from English newspapers and adapted English genres of literary journalism but themselves wrote directly for British
periodicals, Carla Mulford describes how literary journalism traveled the Atlantic world in both directions, carrying difference
and political division with it. Taking Benjamin Franklin as her paradigmatic example, she explains that in America in particular,
the printer was key to this development because the printer and publisher of a paper was also generally its chief writer.
Transatlantic exchange becomes local, and the distant proximate, in Eve Tavor Bannet’s examination of how early Republican
reprints of three largely forgotten sub-genres of the English novel impacted the writing of early American novels
. Arguing that American printers – who generally selected the foreign novels they reprinted for their bearing on local issues
and/or created reprint lists which reflected their own interests or beliefs – created the immediate context in which American
writers had to publish, she shows how early Republican authors both used and altered generic features of the many locally
reprinted novels of female adultery, servant tales, and Atlantic adventure-romances to produce distinctive works of their
own. Colleen Boggs emphasizes the role of such nineteenth-century American periodicals as the
North American Review and the
Dial in translating, reprinting, and popularizing European
Romantic works, and in facilitating “a broader cultural understanding of literatures produced in other countries.”
The print shop was not the only institution in the Atlantic world which transported genres and transmitted texts. Theatre too was an institution which, as Jeffrey Richards puts it, “reflect[ed] a bi-continental
reality in the exchange of news, actors, practices, texts, and commodities (including bodies) as well as dramatic properties”
in multifarious ways. Plays performed in English theatres addressed colonial themes, elaborated American and West Indian situations, or represented American and West Indian personages;
and colonial Americans, traveling to England for schooling or business, were exposed to British theatre. Migrants and British-born
actors and managers, in turn, carried British and Irish plays to America, and later to the new Republican theatre. The meaning
of some plays, such Addison’s Cato (1714), was transformed in the crossing, as they were read and performed by colonial collegians, cited in newspapers, or
used as pseudonyms by patriot writers; other British plays were altered and adapted in situ by their British-born managers or actors to accommodate the political culture and values of their American audiences. Here
too, then, as Richards demonstrates, a “bi-continental” institution created the immediate context in which early Republican
playwrights, such as Royall Tyler and Judith Sargent Murray, began to write, alter, and innovate; not surprisingly, therefore,
many of their plays also implicitly or explicitly contained a thematic “transatlantic vision.”
One of the important things to be learned from the penetration of transatlantic issues into such genres as the letter and
the diary is that, for contemporaries, the Atlantic was not somewhere “out there”: it shaped the realities which affected
people’s everyday lives. As Susan Imbarrato shows in her chapter on life writing
s, settlers and travelers used diaries, letters
, and commonplace books, and intermixed genres, to maintain “family
connections over Atlantic distance” and to “document [their] individual responses to a contemporary world” that included
voyages to Britain and around America, reflections on transatlantically shared books and theatrical pieces, and reactions
to transatlantic cultures and events. As she points out, though not all they wrote found its way into print, their life writings
had an important and determinative impact on print genres. This is clear also from Tim Fulford’s chapter. Beginning from American
Indian John Norton’s journal and from letters reporting the words and conduct of Indian delegates in Britain, Fulford reconstructs
the role of Indians who occupied “the middle ground” between British-American and Indian cultures, and exercised their “precarious”
power by manipulating the goods, symbols, and prejudices of
white culture in highly sophisticated ways. Discussing also the published travel and captivity narratives of such white interpreters
of Indian culture as James Adair, Peter Williamson, and Jonathan Carver, he shows how more “nuanced” representations of Indians
gradually became “pivotal” to a variety of eminent British writers and to a variety of print
genre
s. Alan Rice, who seeks the traces of African-American experience in poems and stories “manipulated for the emotional and
ideological needs” and for the “competing” abolitionist and anti-abolitionist agendas of whites, offers a salutary reminder
of the “silence and absence” of “large majorities of Africans” who were “non-literate and often uncounted and unaccounted
for.” But he too finds, in the letters
of African chaplain Philip Quaque and in the published
History of Mary Prince, evidence of “the paradoxes created by cultural contacts” which created the “Atlantic creole” who had learned how to negotiate
“white” genres, and in Olaudah Equiano and Robert Wedderburn’s
Lives and writings, evidence of how black people used the cultural knowledge they had gained of whites to deal with the class
system and seize opportunities to gain political concessions from the white world.
Janet Sorensen’s chapter demonstrates that maritime experience in the Atlantic, which also formed part of many Britons’ and
Americans’ ordinary lives
, generated an immense amount of writing throughout our period. As she shows, this ranged from “official multi-volume prose
accounts of oceanic travels, scientific discoveries, and military encounters to broadside ballads and songs…picaresque and,
later, historical fiction [and] georgic poems”; and from “highly aestheticized poetic representations of the sea” and mariners’
“how-to” books to stories of prisoner transports, shipwrecks, and castaways. Focusing on the vastness and danger of the ocean,
the diversity of its peoples, their cruelties, inequities, and sufferings, their changing political and commercial relationships
, and the troubling effects of this complex, intrusive, non-homogeneous world at home, Sorensen considers how these issues
penetrated established poetic genres as poets and novelists struggled to encompass, transform, or escape its harsh realities
in figure and metaphor. As Joel Pace points out in our second chapter devoted specifically to Romantic transatlanticism, “metaphor,
particularly the Atlantic as metaphor, is essential” to the Romantic yoking and transcendence in imagination
of opposite values, nations, cultures, places, selves, and times. Comparing Phillis Wheatley’s and Coleridge’s use of ships
and transatlantic oceanic voyages, Pace finds that both poets combined conflicting cultural and linguistic frames to “theorize
the self” – the “I” between image and nation – as representative of the nation, and “enact[ed] social change”
(for instance, abolition of slavery) by offering liberating images of heavenly flight and cosmic consciousness. Paul Giles
argues in similar vein that “geographical knowledge was central to how the world came to understand itself in the Enlightenment,”
and that this had important implications for both colonial and early Republican poetry. He goes on to show how poets such
as Philip Freneau, Joel Barlow, and the Connecticut Wits deployed imagery of global expansion and cosmic order after the Revolution
to “re-balance” America’s position relative to Britain, to critique Old World hierarchy and corruption, and to portray the
new Republic as expanding and rising within, above, and beyond the Atlantic world. Colleen Boggs’s discussion of recent scholarship
on transatlantic Romanticism
makes an intriguingly analogous point. She shows how it goes far beyond rereadings of canonical English Romantics such as
Southey or Blake which demonstrate the impact of such transatlantic issues as slavery, race, and gender
on their literary composition, to dissolve the canon, reshape the study of Romanticism, and place the literatures written
in different genre
s and at different geographic points of the transatlantic world in dialogue with each other. And suggesting that trans-nation
is to Romanticism what gender was to feminism, Boggs offers us a heady image of infinite meanings, dialogues, and interactions
among texts in different genres circulating freely in the Atlantic world, which brilliantly affirms, even while it dissolves,
the concept of Romanticism itself.
Until recently, literary studies everywhere were largely confined within a nationalist framework developed in the mid nineteenth
century, which encouraged scholars to focus principally on the uniqueness, originality, and development of a particular nation’s
literature and to emplot it in exceptionalist and nationalist terms. Many of the contributors to this volume comment on what
Paul Giles calls “the radical dehistoricization” this involved, and explain why the particular genres or writers they discuss
make better sense in their initial transatlantic and transnational contexts. Susan Manning emphasizes the extent to which
both nineteenth-century national history and the nineteenth-century historical novel developed in a transatlantic framework evolved through transnational comparison. Rounding off the volume with a return
to the mutual transformations of historical and fictional narrative that inform Verhoeven’s chapter at the beginning, she
argues that early transatlantic historical fiction both contributes to and deconstructs the idea of a national past, and argues
that early historicizing of a transatlantic imaginary as itself foundational for national fiction.
The contributions to this volume collectively lead us back to the strong sense of international literary interdependence and
textual and generic interrelationship which prevailed in European and American writing before the mid nineteenth century.
The so-called “Republic of Letters” was only one, and in some ways the latest, most superficial, and most short-lived, manifestation
of this transnational interdependence which crossed class, gender, and generic lines. At the same time, in reconstructing some of these transatlantic interrelationships, the contributors
to this volume help us see how much we have forgotten, and how much has yet to be retrieved. In the process, they reveal just
how partial, anachronistic, and unsatisfactory merely self-referential national literary histories have come to seem.
NOTES
1 Jacques Derrida, Parages (Paris: Galilee, 1986). See also
Margaret Cohen, “Traveling Genres,” New Literary History 34 (2003), 481–99.
2 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1983; London and New York: Verso, 1991).
3 John Frow, Genre (New York: Routledge, 2006).