Recovery, Repositioning, and Revision: New Writing on Transatlantic Literature

Revisionism means we ask new questions of old texts, explore old texts in new ways, or recover texts that were unimportant to an old paradigm but have different significance under the new. Transatlantic studies is a general umbrella term for an approach that has resulted in a quite dramatic and still ongoing revision of how we engage with the history and literature of countries sitting around the Atlantic rim. Although, of course, not confined to Britain and the United States, transatlantic studies has had a particularly significant impact on our current understanding of the national histories and literatures of these two nations. Perhaps the impact was to be expected given the ties between Britain and her American colonies and the way that the American Revolution created a necessary reinterpretation and reconstruction of that association after independence was declared in 1776. America and Britain were joined together in a complex relationship that was, at one and the same time, both strained and rich, but had at its heart an enduring connection that Edmund Burke described to the British Parliament in 1775 as “ties, which, though light as air, are as strong as links of iron” (98). Regardless of political machinations, dramatic and important though they were, the Anglo-American shared history and heritage was too powerful to overcome and too admired to reject.

The reality of Burke’s perceived ties meant an ongoing British and American relationship was inevitable even though somewhat fraught and problematic on official levels. Rather than a barrier, the Atlantic was a bridge, sometimes calm and easily crossed; at other times stormy and treacherous. It was impossible to divorce the two nations completely while economic, intellectual, social, and familial links remained and were constantly reinforced, however poorly understood by contemporaries, or appreciated and researched by historians. American historiography and literary analysis has long been bent toward identifying that which marked America as unique and separate. We collectively sought an understanding of America that homogenized the variegated tapestry that was American life and emphasized similarities rather than differences within the nation, and differences rather than similarities among nations. The result was a foundational national story that privileged American exceptionalism above all else.

It was very difficult to make a claim for potential national success and new purpose without some sense of agreed self-importance based on an articulated difference. In the introduction to their edited volume Transatlantic Literary Studies, 1660–1830, Eve Tavor Bannet and Susan Manning argue that “literary studies everywhere were largely confined within a nationalistic framework developed in the mid-nineteenth century, which encouraged scholars to focus principally on the uniqueness, originality, and development of a particular nation’s literature and to employ it in exceptionalist and nationalistic terms” (8). However, in the case of the United States, this disciplinary trend was further supported by the thrust of the national story more broadly. Exceptionalism defined America. The contradictory notion of creating a new nation based on the values of the old, for example, appeared only sparingly in American historiography before the revisionism of transatlantic studies made it far more acceptable. John Murrin commented that “the Revolution was thus the culminating moment in the process of anglicization” (340). Such a conservative position would sit much more comfortably among current histories than when it appeared in 1987, at the tail end of the heyday of the great homogenizing force that was American studies, and before transatlantic studies blossomed into such a driver of revisionism for American history. In 2002, Manning, for example, described the role of the Declaration of Independence...