The Adventures of Emmera, the Transatlantic Novel, and the Fiction of America

In a recent article, Stephen Carl Arch has challenged the continuing critical and pedagogical limitations on what constitutes the American novel, despite the attention given to transatlantic concerns within the discipline of early American studies. Classes on the novel, he claims, cling tightly to "the old critical chestnut" that the first American novel is William Hill Brown's 1789 Power of Sympathy, while they ignore the work Arch holds up to our attention, Frances Brooke's The History of Emily Montague (1769), a novel that includes significant scenes set in North America. In Arch's understanding, that text accentuates the trope of the interregnum, a situating between various states and lands, and is a particularly trenchant figure for a work that imagines both sides of the Atlantic. Even if, in the end, the main male character, Col. Ed Rivers, "brings into existence a fantasy of domestic, sensible resemblance in the English countryside," the critic argues that Emily Montague "deserves to be part of a restored, transatlantic tradition of the novel" (Arch 465, 478, 481).¹ Although since Arch's article appeared there has been increased critical interest in transatlanticism, what follows takes its cue from Arch's important act of restoration by asking questions about classification through consideration of another, contemporary text to Brooke's, The Adventures of Emmera.

Transatlanticism and the Fiction of America

Ever since William Spengemann raised the question of classification regarding Aphra Behn's Oroonoko, students of the American eighteenth century have at least contemplated the possibility of admitting into the fold works other than those written by native-born Americans on American-centered subjects (Spengemann, "The Earliest American Novel"). One central problem, however, has to do with nationality—or nationalism—and literature. As Arch's article suggests, it is one thing to bespeak an interest in transatlanticism—quite another to work out what it means for the whole study of American literature, particularly "early." In a related act of reinterpretation, Srinivas Aravamudan has argued that the English novel, understood as a discrete tradition based on realist, domestic concerns (the myth of origin in Richardson's Pamela), falls apart under scrutiny of the record of fiction writing and publication before mid century. The "English" novel overflows with "French" novels, mixed-genre texts, and fictionalized narratives set in a variety of non-English settings, all suggesting that the later nationalizing of the novel is a rescripting of the actual experience of novel reading in the eighteenth century. What he proposes for the English tradition is to consider "a horizontally integrative 'geography' of transnational influence and exchange, rather than the more familiar vertical and genealogical 'history' of the national model." The kind of "nation-centered gate-keeping" that prevents the entrance or consideration of nonconforming texts becomes a kind of critical "navel-gazing" that ignores the more vibrant, complex, transnational dimension to the circulation of fiction in English. In essence, he concludes, "the agency ascribed to 'the novel' is a displaced function of the teleological project of constructing national culture" (Aravamudan 71, 66).

If the English tradition of this period can be resolved into a broader, denationalized scheme, as I think Aravamudan rightly insists, it follows that such considerations ought to be raised for American fiction as well. As Elizabeth Dillon has suggested, we would do well to discard "the neat conjunction of nation and novel" for considerations of the forces at work in "an eighteenth-century nascent global market shaped by the forces of colonialism, mercantile capitalism, and imperialism" (235). And while I do not intend to replay her argument regarding the "contractual" nature of fictions that might be considered American, I wish to stress her more general point that there exist linkages among texts written on either side of the Atlantic that deserve as much or more attention as stated fact of nationality: "If the novel is not the diffusion of national spirit, then the history of the early American novel might be revised considerably" (239). Such revision, I would argue, is fundamental if the term American is to have any meaning for eighteenth-century letters. The...