New Fields, Conventional Habits, and the Legacy of Atlantic Double-Cross

In 1986, literary critic Robert Weisbuch published a study of the American Renaissance entitled Atlantic Double-Cross: American Literature and British Influence in the Age of Emerson.¹ In this study, he focused on a number of canonical US authors and showed how they wrote both with and against their British predecessors and peers: Herman Melville and Charles Dickens; Walt Whitman and Matthew Arnold; Henry David Thoreau and William Wordsworth; Ralph Waldo Emerson and Thomas Carlyle. Weisbuch used these specific pairings to illustrate some more general claims about the relation of US to British literature, among them that US literature is what he called “actualist” where British literature is realist, and that British authors see themselves as belated with respect to the national literature they have inherited where US authors see themselves as premature with respect to a national literature that does not yet exist. Underlying these claims was a conception of influence that Weisbuch borrowed from Walter Jackson Bate by way of Harold Bloom.² Where Bate and Bloom saw influence as generational, Weisbuch re-cast it in national terms. The authors of the American Renaissance, in his account, felt a profound rivalry with the British and expressed this rivalry through what would prove to be a productive enmity.

Weisbuch could have presented Atlantic Double-Cross as belonging to the field of US literary studies: after all, F. O. Matthiessen had emphasized the significance of British literature for the American Renaissance in the study that gave the period its name. But instead Weisbuch presents Atlantic Double-Cross as belonging to no existing field at all. Identifying it as the first study to “investigate texts extensively to get at a characterization of Anglo-American influence,” he goes on to call for more such studies to be written:

We will need many more books after this one to get to a satisfying assurance of major understanding. . . . Nevertheless, I will boast that this study represents something new. It means to inaugurate a new field, or subfield, of literary study. The conventional habits by which departments of English and comparative literature organize themselves have made for a vacancy where a rigorous study of Anglo-American literary relations should have been occurring.

(xx)

Two things are crucial here. First, that Weisbuch aspires to create a “new field or subfield,” and second, that he imagines this “new field” will somehow circumvent the “conventional habits of departments of English.” In what follows, I will show that Atlantic Double-Cross did play a crucial role in establishing a new field, the one we now call “trans-Atlantic studies.” But, I will suggest, the establishment of this field had an unintended consequence: it permitted English departments to pass through our recent transnational turn with their “conventional habits” largely unchanged.

[T]he establishment of [trans-Atlantic studies] had an unintended consequence: it permitted English departments to pass through our recent transnational turn with their “conventional habits” largely unchanged.

1. A New Field or Subfield

No book can create a field on its own: that happens only in its reception. When Atlantic Double-Cross first appeared, it was reviewed widely and very seriously, with the kind of rigor that distinguishes books judged to be important enough to argue with. The arguments, in this case, proved to be unusually rich. Two of its first reviewers, Jonathan Arac and Lawrence Buell, either had written or would write foundational trans-Atlantic works of their own, Commissioned Spirits: The Shaping of Social Motion in Dickens, Carlyle, Melville, and Hawthorne (1979) and “American Literary Emergence as Post-Colonial Phenomenon” (1992), respectively, while another, Harry Levin, was a distinguished comparatist. So it is hardly surprising that their reviews, along with the reviews of several other critics, proved to be remarkably prescient in both recognizing the significance of Atlantic Double-Cross and in identifying its limitations.

All of the reviewers had reservations about some of Weisbuch’s readings, and all took exception to his energetic style, but nearly all saw...