A01=Leonard Tennenhouse
American poetry
Americans
Arthur Mervyn
Austen
Author_Leonard Tennenhouse
Benito Cereno
British America
British Americans
British literature
British North America
Cambridge University Press
Captivity narrative
Category=DSB
Charles Brockden Brown
Charlotte Temple
Clarissa
Cosmopolitanism
Criticism
David Humphreys (soldier)
Edgar Huntly
English literature
English novel
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
Exchange of women
Exclusion
Fiction
Genre
Gothic fiction
Harriet Beecher Stowe
Hegemony
Henry Knox
Hugh Henry Brackenridge
Imperialism
Joel Barlow
John Carter Brown Library
Lawrence Buell
Literacy
Literature
Mary Rowlandson
Masculinity
Memoir
Mrs.
Narrative
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Newspaper
Novel
Novelist
Of Education
Oxford University Press
Palgrave Macmillan
Philip Freneau
Poetry
Printing
Prose
Publication
Publishing
Rhetoric
Seduction
Sensibility
Sentimentalism (literature)
Slavery
T. H. Breen
The Castle of Otranto
The House of the Seven Gables
The Man of Feeling
The Mysteries of Udolpho
The Other Hand
The Power of Sympathy
The Various
Translatio studii
University of California Press
Writer
Writing
Product details
- ISBN 9780691096810
- Weight: 397g
- Dimensions: 152 x 235mm
- Publication Date: 05 Aug 2007
- Publisher: Princeton University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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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.
Leonard Tennenhouse is professor of English, comparative literature, and modern culture and media at Brown University. He is the author of "Power on Display: The Politics of Shakespeare's Genres".
