Virtual Americas: Transnational Fictions and the Transatlantic Imaginary (review)

In Virtual Americas: Transnational Fictions and the Transatlantic Imaginary, Paul Giles defines virtualization as the contingencies of perception in electronic and digital media where the interface between original and replica has been "eliminated" (11). Most telling in Giles's definition is how "virtualization" is associated with culture and capital and how this link is helpful in analyzing the classic phase of American studies. In reading Las Vegas as the city of virtuality and of abundance, Giles argues how American fictions of abundance connect with philosophical idealism and how American capitalism and transcendentalism function by "'virtualizing' natural phenomena into their shadow or replica" (12).

Giles's overall project is to "virtualize" America and analyze the processes that have helped construct mythologies of nationalism and of American exceptionalism. In reading together works by Frederick Douglass, Herman Melville, Henry James, Robert Frost, Vladimir Nabokov, Thomas Pynchon and poets such as Thom Gunn and Sylvia Plath, Giles juxtaposes American cultural narratives with those of Europe and examines the national mythologies framing these narratives. By "virtualizing" America, Giles demonstrates how "indigenous representations of the 'natural'" function as tautologies without "reference to anything outside their own charmed circle" (2). Besides analyzing mythologies of nation formation, an important focus of Virtual Americas is to establish an alternative genealogy for American studies, one that is informed by transnational and transcultural forces and by the seemingly homogeneous construction of American studies of the 1950s and 1960s.

Giles's chapter, "Narrative Reversals and Power Exchanges: Frederick Douglass and British Culture," successfully argues how the three autobiographies of Douglass (Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, 1845; My Bondage and My Freedom, 1855; Life and Times, 1882, revised 1883) and the work of William Lloyd Garrison's abolitionist movement demystify Britain's perception of being an antislavery power. Comparing the plight of the oppressed in both the United States and in Britain shows the "explicit violence" in both American and British societies and the transatlantic plight of the oppressed (46). Giles analyzes the parallel histories of labor in both continents, as exemplified by Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South (1855) and its rhetoric of a divided England, and concludes that Douglass's biographies unsettled the myth of England's labor and social unity by mirroring the North/South conflict in postbellum United States.

Especially interesting is chapter 3, "'Bewildering Intertanglement': Melville's Engagement with British Tradition." This chapter provides a welcomed re-reading of Melville's canonical texts and traces alternative genealogies for reading Melville's work, especially in terms of what Giles considers to be Melville's project of comparing "American slavery of race with British slavery of class" (58). Moreover, Giles demonstrates how his parodic writing helps explain the general discomfort of British critics reading Melville after the Second World War. In addition to highlighting the way in which the composition of Moby Dick (1851) was intrinsically connected with British literature (Melville, for example, based his style for Moby Dick on Thomas Carlyle's Sartor Resartus, a book he borrowed from Evert Duyckinck's library in July 1850), Giles shows how Melville's interaction with British culture and literary models was parodic and intertextual instead of oppositional. Pierre (1852), for example, shows how the genealogy of aristocratic England is no less arbitrary than that of demagogical America. Especially useful for scholars is Giles's reading of "masking" in works such as The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade (1857). In Melville's last novel, "masking" not only instrumentalizes deception for a confidence-man working the river economy of the Mississippi, but in Giles's reading "masking" also dismantles global rather than regional forms of class and of capital. Throughout Virtual Americas, Giles shows the importance of making the canonical seem foreign and estranged. In the case of Melville, American literature works to aestheticize British literature by showing how its literary conventions are an "elaborate masquerade . . . made different by the advent of American culture, which opens up an alternative...