Atlantic Double-Cross: American Literature and British Influence in the Age of Emerson

TLDR

The nineteenth‑century transatlantic literary scene was marked by American writers striving to forge a distinct national literature while English critics warned that such efforts would inevitably fail. Weisbuch investigates how American literary nationalism emerged as a deliberate attempt to resist and ultimately transcend contemporary British influence. He analyzes paired English–American text sets, alternating investigations of causes, motives, and outcomes with detailed case studies of authors such as Melville, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Whitman, and Poe. The study shows that Americans turned national disadvantages into strengths by rethinking history, time, and self, parodying major British works, and thereby shaping the American literary canon.

Abstract

In this ambitious study of the intense and often adversarial relationship between English and American literature in the nineteenth century, Robert Weisbuch portrays the rise of American literary nationalism as a self-conscious effort to resist and, finally, to transcend the contemporary British influence. Describing the transatlantic double-cross of literary influence, Weisbuch documents both the American desire to createa literature distinctly different from English models and the English insistence that any such attempt could only fail. The American response, as he demonstrates, was to make strengths out of national disadvantages by rethinking history, time, and traditional concepts of the self, and by reinterpreting and ridiculing major British texts in mocking allusions and scornful parodies. Weisbuch approaches a precise characterization of this double-cross by focusing on paired sets of English and American texts. Investigations of the causes, motives, and literary results of the struggle alternate with detailed analyses of several test cases. Weisbuch considers Melville's challenge to Dickens, Thoreau's response to Coleridge and Wordsworth, Hawthorne's adaptation of Keats and influence on Eliot, Whitman's competition with Arnold, and Poe's reshaping of Shelley. Adding a new dimension to the exploration of an emerging aesthetic consciousness, Atlantic Double-Cross provides important insights into the creation of the American literary canon.