Transatlantic Insurrections: British Culture and the Formation of American Literature, 1730-1860 (review)

178EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION15:1 Paul Giles. TransatlanticInsurrections: Brithh Culture and tL·Formation ofAmerican Literature, 1 730-1860. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001. 262pp. US$55 (cloth); US$19.95 (paper). ISBN 0-8122-3603-3. Comparative literature had its beginning in the Renaissance search to define "genre": assuming that Homer and Virgil, for example, were writing the same sort of poem, what shared features could be extracted from their texts to form a template for the ideal epic? The task was not easy. Boccaccio worked hard to persuade himself and his readers that Achilles was as pious as Aeneas, and the definitions of satire and pastoral were notoriously problematic. But the various genres as eventually defined became the basis for much eighteenth-century comparative criticism. Addison prefaces his influential study of Milton, "I shall therefore examine [Paradue Lost] by the Rules of Epic Poetry, and see whether it falls short of the Iliad or Aeneid, in the Beauties which are essential to that Kind of Writing" (Spectator, 5 January 1712.) The academic discipline of comparative literature, however, more studious to divide than to unite, has often worked less to define genres than to define national variations within genres, contrasting Rasselas and Candide, Rousseau and Richardson. Yet comparative studies of British and American literatures, rare until recendy, used to be driven not by difference but by the concept of a cultural time-lag—English metropolitan creativity being provincially adapted to the American environment, much as the tavern sign of George III in "Rip Van Winkle" was touched up to represent George Washington. Even George Dekker's masterly TL·American Hhtorical Romance (1987), tracing the "Waverley" tradition in Cooper, Hawthorne, and others, comes near to validating this Anglo-oriented thesis. The very natural and proper reaction against such a view ofAmerican literature had been a sort of isolationist reading—FO. Matthiessen's focus, sixty years ago, on Transcendentalism instáis Emerson and Thoreau at the centre of the canon, and the Civil War as the nation-defining event. The national culture stood by itself, making everything new—breaking what could be broken. But comparative studies have been much in vogue since A. Owen Aldridge's Early American Literature: A Comparatht Approach (1982) brought a new theoretical sophistication to the cross-reading ofAmerican and other literatures. Paul Giles's new book is a major reinvestigation of the topic, dealing less with traditional ideas of influence and more with the subtle cultural intertwinings of British and American writings in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Giles builds his study around the Revolutionary War—clearly the defining comparative moment in the Anglo-American relationship, and a moment that had a more profound and protracted influence on both nations' sensibilities and anxieties than the Matthiessen thesis would allow. Franklin andJefferson, the War's idealogues, and Washington Irving, its mythologist, REVIEWS179 are his principals on the one side; Richardson, Sterne, and Austen on the other. (His book begins with an analysis of the impact of Pope on the Connecticut Wits, and ends with chapters on Hawthorne, Trollope, and Poe. This review focuses on Giles's treatment ofeighteenth-century fiction.) The Revolution was a family quarrel, and Giles proposes that in the years surrounding it British and American prose narratives each tended to represent , as subtext, the other's constitutional and intellectual positions. In Austen's stories, the inheritance of a social and domestic stability which seemed, for many readers in the early twentieth century, to provide the nostalgic comfort of an amiable world, may also be seen as a legal and political confinement which the characters strive to transgress, even as the "colonists " transgressed in 1776. Yet, paradoxically, Austen's texts can oscillate between each set of values. Sense may sometimes predominate, sometimes sensibility. The harmony of Mansfield Park resonates against the discord of the "Plantation." And similarly, in Irving's "Legend of Sleepy Hollow" there is marked tension between the apparently genial pastoral comedy— as if in the good-tempered English ballad-operas by, of all people, GentlemanJohnny Burgoyne—and the issues of power and dominion underlying the personality of the schoolmaster and his distinctly creepy love-sickness. Though each engages with problems ofauthority, neitherAusten nor...