Literature, American Style: The Originality of Imitation in the Early Republic by Ezra Tawil (review)

Plainspoken. Unaffected. Rough and unpolished. Inelegant, but authentic. In the middle of the nineteenth century, American writers would celebrate these as fundamentally American literary traits representing a sharp break with European traditions. Calling himself "an American, one of the roughs," Walt Whitman would promise in Leaves of Grass to embody "an American rude tongue." While Europeans remained mannered, decadent, and artificial, Americans had ostensibly stripped away the excessive ornamentation of gentility and exposed a more honest way of writing.

As Ezra Tawil shows in Literature, American Style, these American celebrations of plain, unaffected artlessness were far from a new phenomenon at midcentury: American writers of the early republic such as Noah Webster, J. Hector St. John de Crévecoeur, Charles Brockden Brown, and Susanna Rowson had championed the same aesthetic values in the previous century. But Tawil shows startlingly that these early republican writers celebrated these literary virtues not as putatively American innovations, the way Whitman, Melville, and Emerson would do later; rather, eighteenth-century American writers promoted them explicitly as imported European virtues. This "'imitation' of foreign forms," Tawil writes, is in the eighteenth century "simply not the same crime against cultural sovereignty that it will represent" decades later for American Renaissance writers (179). Tawil's eighteenth-century informants shared a fantasy not of a self-originating American culture but of the best parts of a British culture transplanted, curated, and done in a distinctive way.

In this respect, Tawil is working in territory delineated by Leonard Tennenhouse in The Importance of Feeling English (Princeton, NJ, 2007) and Elisa Tamarkin in Anglophilia: Deference, Devotion, and Antebellum America (Chicago, 2008)—two landmark monographs that have discredited the old "anglophobia hypothesis" of American cultural history. Like Tennenhouse and Tamarkin, Tawil argues that postrevolutionary Americans were concerned less with rejecting all things English than with outdoing the English on their own terms. Tawil's contribution to this important line of thinking is the observation that although postrevolutionary Americans were committed to working with British forms, they also were committed to understanding their cultural productions as distinctively American. How did they navigate this paradox? Tawil's deceptively simple answer is that Americans understood their cultural productions as British in substance and American in "style." What "style" meant in this context is one of the chief concerns of the book.

The clearest picture of Tawil's substance/style dyad emerges in his chapter on Noah Webster, the linguist, educator, spelling reformer, and lexicographer. Unlike some more eccentric voices of his moment, Webster had no interest in doing away with the English language or replacing it with an "autochthonous" American tongue. He wanted to work with imported linguistic materials—but wanted to develop a distinctive American "style" of doing so. He settled on spelling reform as a way to preserve the "substance" of the English language while changing its style. Although later generations would celebrate Webster's "American" spellings of words like color and honor as a triumph of democratic simplicity over aristocratic obfuscation, the shift toward the u-less spelling was in fact promoted in numerous British dictionaries before Webster ever entered the fray. Webster was therefore less the inventor of an American style of spelling than one who helped to characterize a transatlantic spelling movement as distinctively American. His declared goal was not to reject British models but to put into action "a cultural rebirth that had begun in England centuries earlier but had stalled in its country of origin" (62). One of the book's most interesting observations is that the literary and linguistic styles framed as "American" often involved eliminating something from the styles framed as British, as is literally the case in the excision of the letter u from colour. But Tawil's chief point here is that literary and linguistic "'Americanness' … was initially little more than the name for the best qualities...