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  • The Importance of Feeling English: American Literature and the British Diaspora, 1750-1850
  • Christopher Looby (bio)
The Importance of Feeling English: American Literature and the British Diaspora, 1750-1850. Leonard Tennenhouse. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007. 158 pp.

Are we being transatlantic yet? In this elegant and incisive book, Leonard Tennenhouse is, but in a very particular way.1 For some scholars, and for some projects, there may be a good reason to adopt a posture of indifference to nationality, or to treat English literature and American as symmetrical halves of an Anglophone literary field, privileging neither one nor the other. And for other scholars, and for other projects, discarding an Anglophone frame of reference altogether or circumscribing one's topic in an inter-American fashion may be imperative. But in The Importance of Feeling English Tennenhouse articulates and enacts a critical approach that is transatlantic in a deep and exemplary way, but that is also decidedly tilted toward questions that may seem to some, in this time of transnational and hemispheric and multiethnic critical turns, to be surprisingly old-fashioned: he is frankly interested, finally, in what is "peculiarly American" (123) about Benito Cereno, for example, and what that peculiarity may tell us about the qualities that "lend our national culture its distinctive identity" (127). It may come as a surprise to some readers (as it did to me) that this book, which appears at first to take part in an effort to displace nationality from its customary central place in literary study, is in the end quite committed to describing and analyzing national distinction. The fundamental paradox of its analysis—that the distinctiveness of American literature derives from its Englishness, once that Englishness has been transmuted into a structure of feeling or generic property that can be detached from its actual geopolitical origins—is a subtle one that suffers just a bit from the compressed expression it receives here, but that certainly [End Page 185] deserves to be expanded and tested by others in relation to more and different texts.

What is greatly satisfying about The Importance of Feeling English is that it is a book that knows what it wants to do, and does it with uncommon adroitness; it articulates its goals clearly and briskly and then carries out its agenda with dispatch. Those goals are by turns quite vast—in effect offering a new theory of American literature tout court—and quite fine grained—explaining, for example, how certain Connecticut Wits "used the discipline provided by Pope's heroic couplet to make the tradition of British letters speak with a distinctively American voice" (41). Notice, again, the turn to what is "distinctively American." Elsewhere Tennenhouse claims that Freneau "lays claim to a distinctively American voice" (42), and elsewhere yet again he finds that there is "something distinctive" (96) about gothic fiction in America. The project of finding and describing the distinctively American is not, of course, an exceptionalist project here, because Tennenhouse's analyses are worldly and historical rather than the reverse.

As it is, even in its brief compass Tennenhouse's book touches on an intriguingly broad and somewhat idiosyncratic archive of texts, selected from the span of a century's worth of literary production (although, notably, a hundred-year stretch that has unconventional and arbitrary beginning and ending points, 1750 and 1850). Although it addresses a fair number of familiar and canonical texts, including Cooper's The Pathfinder, Hawthorne's "My Kinsman, Major Molineux" and The House of the Seven Gables, Melville's Benito Cereno, Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher," and Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, this book, like a lot of the most interesting scholarship today, assembles an archive that is largely at odds with the conventional generic categories and assignments of value that still hold considerable sway in the field. That is, there's lots of fresh new material here, otherwise neglected or overlooked or unknown, out of print and not usually taught, that will be worth our reading now that Tennenhouse has sifted it out and told us why it's important. Close attention is given not only to the poetry of Joel Barlow...

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