Romantic Dialogues: Anglo-American Continuities, 1776-1862 (review)

Richard Gravil’s study of the crucial debt owed by American romantic writers such as Emerson, Hawthorne, and Whitman to their English romantic forebears seems appropriate in this globalizing era that increasingly questions the validity of cultural categories based on nationhood. For Gravil, the prevailing academic boundary between American and British literatures makes little sense when these two supposedly distinct traditions are so clearly interdependent. Challenging the conventional notion that American literature emerged from Emerson’s early essays, Gravil positions Blake, Wordsworth, and Coleridge as its true progenitors: just as Locke’s libertarian political writings bore their greatest fruit in Jefferson’s famous manifesto, so the English romantics’ most characteristic notions of liberty and selfhood were fulfilled in the United States and its literature.

Although the British romantics who emerged in the revolutionary era of 1789 established themselves as the touchstones of progressive literary sensibility and practice in the English-speaking world, Gravil argues that their ideals were not genuinely realized until Emerson and other figures of the American Renaissance succeeded in imbuing them with a confidence and energy often undermined by, for example, Coleridgean dejection. For the most part eschewing any dealings with fashionable cultural theory, Gravil calls his model of literary history “dialogic,” a cross-fertilizing relationship whose potential was invented on one side of the Atlantic and actualized on the other. If it required Whitman’s 1855 preface to Leaves of Grass to characterize America as a great poem, Gravil’s study contends that this great poem had, in effect, been written decades earlier by Wordsworth and Blake.

Influence studies are usually more helpful in establishing shared contexts and highlighting differences than in pinning down direct borrowings or allusions. Gravil is most compelling in introductory chapters where he traces the emergence of American liberal ideals as a decisive force in English political debate, especially for visionaries such as Richard Price whose anticipation of a “united-states of the English-speaking world,” in Gravil’s phrasing, must seem prescient to current theorists of the New World Order. Before taking up the major figures of American letters, Gravil offers illuminating and detailed discussions of several minor but representative figures of what he calls “an indigenous American Romanticism,” and of the “periodical war” of the 1820s spurred by Sydney Smith’s pointed put-down of American books.

With something like the animus of that era, Gravil deposes Emerson as the father of American literature with repeated charges of paraphrase, borrowing, appropriation, and outright plagiarism. In Emerson’s place he installs James Fenimore Cooper—but primarily Cooper’s hero Natty Bumppo, who transgresses so many of Cooper’s own Burkean values and thus embodies a distinctly American deviation from British romantic ideology. The limitations of Gravil’s approach are most evident in his discussion of Poe, whom he judges even more harshly than Emerson, dismissing Poe’s entire poetic output as a “sad aberration.” Although his thesis leads him into an occasional blind alley, Gravil’s deft and learned applications of key texts in British romanticism to works by Thoreau, Melville, Dickinson, Whitman, and Hawthorne powerfully challenge the easy presumption of an autochthonous American writing.