The Importance of Feeling English : : American Literature and the British Diaspora, 1750-1850 / / Leonard Tennenhouse.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Princeton University Press Complete eBook-Package 2016
• VerfasserIn: Tennenhouse, Leonard,
• Place / Publishing House: Princeton, NJ : : Princeton University Press, , [2009]; ©2007
• Year of Publication: 2009
• Edition: Course Book
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (176 p.)
• Other title: Frontmatter --; Contents --; Acknowledgments --; 1. Diaspora and Empire --; 2. Writing English in America --; 3. The Sentimental Libertine --; 4. The Heart of Masculinity --; 5. The Gothic in Diaspora --; Afterword. From Cosmopolitanism to Hegemony --; Notes --; Index
• Format: Mode of access: Internet via World Wide Web.
• ISBN: 9781400827923; 9783110638592; 9783110442502
• DOI: 10.1515/9781400827923
• Access: restricted access
• Hierarchical level: Monograph
• Statement of Responsibility: Leonard Tennenhouse.

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.