Revisiting A New World of Words

When A New World of Words: Redefining Early American Literature was first published in 1994, few reviewers knew what to make of William C. Spengemann's call to revamp all of literary studies, a call that made Early American Literature encompass virtually everything written in English during the colonial period. Only then could we explain "What America did to the [English] language—lexically, semantically, and syntactically" (210). Yet, despite the fact that no one to date has adopted his definition of the field, that call did not go unheeded, and A New World of Words is routinely cited by a growing number of scholars in early American literary studies. The field has grown considerably in the dozen or so years since Spengemann's book first appeared, and his concern with how we identify and characterize what is American about British American writing of the pre-national period has become the question generating much new work in the field. Believing that A New World of Words should cast light on that question and how we are now addressing it, I accepted the Book Review Editor's invitation to do a follow-up review.

To argue his case for American literature, Spengemann reminds us that literature is made out of language. The discovery of America, he writes, "did not divide the language into two separate streams, one American the other British" (47). Instead, "The efforts of writers on the frontier to make the language say 'America' flowed back to the stylistic capital, London, in the form of letters, reports, dispatches, and before long, printed books. These writings taught readers back home in England new ways of conceiving the world and their place in it" (47). Spengemann is quite explicit: when we look at the colonial period as language, the pressure of America will reveal itself in everything from an increase in vocabulary having to do with America, to persistent allusions, tropes, and figures, as well as specific literary references, representations, and character types. On this basis, he claims that all "Early American Literature" was no more nor less than "a crucial phase in the Americanization of English" (49).

In this model, "Early" refers to "a moment in the development of modern English where the language" starts coming to terms with "America"; "America" describes those English words writers employ to try "to take hold of 'America'"; and "Literature" is the means by which this language "transcends its own historical moment and speaks directly to the present" (49). By removing Early American Literature from a nationalist agenda and focusing on the linguistic pressure that "America" put on the English language, Spengemann not only increases many times over the number of works in English that can be considered Early American Literature. His afterword to the book also proposes that the linguistic impact of America on the other languages written in and about America makes those literatures American too. Spengemann's virtual "America" indeed swallows up other national literatures—Spanish, Portuguese, French, Dutch, German, and Russian—in a more comprehensive manner than any imperialist fantasy of conquest and conversion.

The chapters fulfilling this grand vision of American literature offer striking examples of some of the ways we might determine the American effect on English writing. Taking up John Smith's True Relation, Spengemann claims that America determined the selection and choice of words Smith employed. To mount this argument, Spengemann reads Smith's dilemma as that of a man attempting "to create a space for himself on the frontier between two warring empires: the British America of King James and the Indian America of Powhatan, both of which would subjugate him" (83). Then, in an audaciously counterintuitive move, Spengemann takes the reader from The True Relation—though written by an Englishman, long considered a foundational work of Early American Literature—to a canonical work of British literature, Paradise Lost. In Paradise Lost, Spengemann reads Satan's voyage to the world newly created for Adam and Eve as an analogue to the many accounts...