Formalism, Experience, and the Making of American Literature in the Nineteenth Century by Theo Davis (review)

The influence of the Scots on early American literature has been the focus of a number of important studies, particularly in terms of the question of how early American writers were influenced by and responded to a search for nationalism. Scholarship ranging from Terence Martin’s The Instructed Vision: Scottish Common Sense Philosophy and the Origins of American Fiction (1961) to more contemporary work such as that of Michael Davitt Bell’s The Development of American Romance: The Sacrifice of Relation (1980) and Maurice Lee’s Slavery, Philosophy, and American Literature, 1830–1860 (2005) have all addressed the impact Common Sense Philosophy had on early American authorship. Theo Davis’s Formalism, Experience, and the Making of American Literature in the Nineteenth Century is the most recent contribution to this line of scholarship that interrogates the relationship between Scottish realism and American authors. However, in opposition to new historicist critics who have focused on either uncovering the private citizen or reconciling liberal individuality with public disembodiment, Davis recasts experience as an abstracted form of engagement that is completely discrete and universal rather than subjective, local, or particular.

Davis focuses specifically on Lord Kames’s Elements of Criticism and Archibald Alison’s Essays on the Nature and Principles of Taste to trace the philosophical roots of the conception of experience as a disembodied—and aesthetic—act. A literary work or painting for both Kames and Alison are treated as mere touchstones or conduits into a trained and predictable process of thought so that the act of seeing or knowing is in itself what gets observed. The artwork and anything outside it (either historical/contextual details or what the individual brings) ceases to exist. The mental process that derives, however, is what matters as it enables an experience of abstraction, one that Davis argues, is “not held in the text, not given over to the individual reader, but managed as one directs a kite” (27).

To further her claim that literary nationalism was grounded in the Scots’ privileging of the universal over the particular, Davis points to the role critics such as Edward Tyrell Channing played in cementing a literary nationalism committed less to individualism than abstraction. A writer such as Charles Brockden Brown is praised by Channing, for example, as one who is able to elicit a series of associations in readers that becomes an experience unto itself. Brown’s use of the phenomenal world is only the vehicle (albeit temporary) to deliver readers to a greater, universal sense of knowing that transcends the concrete, material, or local. Davis argues that “the account of American literary nationalism as embodied and particularized has been overstressed”; instead, she wants to recover a literary nationalism that has less to do with American particularities than with the attempt American writers made to tap into universal connection so that, as Davis puts it, “Anyone would be interested in literature about America—not just Americans who had experienced the world it depicted” (54).

Davis focuses on five antebellum writers who employ types and emblems rather than subjective idealism to convey universal experience: John Neal, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Bronson Alcott, and Harriett Beecher Stowe. The chapter on Neal counters the view of him as a writer ingrained in the colloquial and local by showing him to be tied more closely to the ideas of Channing and the work of abstracted experience than previously thought. His use of dialogue, colloquialisms, and interest in creating American types in the 1828 novel Rachel Dyer obscures Neal’s alignment with a nationalist effort of disembodiment, according to Davis.

Hawthorne shares with the other writers under study an interest in using language to create an abstraction, and in his case a particular abstraction that revolves around a relationship between author and reader. Meaning for Hawthorne, Davis argues, is “beside the point” (107). Instead, Hawthorne is more concerned with an “abstract structure that is, in effect, the property...