American literature is typically seen as something that inspired its own conception and that sprang into being as a cultural offshoot of America's desire for national identity. But what of the vast ...precedent established by English literature, which was a major American import between 1750 and 1850? In The Importance of Feeling English, Leonard Tennenhouse revisits the landscape of early American literature and radically revises its features. Using the concept of transatlantic circulation, he shows how some of the first American authors--from poets such as Timothy Dwight and Philip Freneau to novelists like William Hill Brown and Charles Brockden Brown--applied their newfound perspective to pre-existing British literary models. These American "re-writings" would in turn inspire native British authors such as Jane Austen and Horace Walpole to reconsider their own ideas of subject, household, and nation. The enduring nature of these literary exchanges dramatically recasts early American literature as a literature of diaspora, Tennenhouse argues--and what made the settlers' writings distinctly and indelibly American was precisely their insistence on reproducing Englishness, on making English identity portable and adaptable. Written in an incisive and illuminating style, The Importance of Feeling English reveals the complex roots of American literature, and shows how its transatlantic movement aided and abetted the modernization of Anglophone culture at large.
Power on Display Tennenhouse, Leonard
1986, 20130415, 2004, 2013-04-15, Letnik:
6
eBook
First published in 1986. 'Impressively open to the complexity of cultural discourses, to the ways in which one discursive form may function as a screen for another above all to the political ...entailment of genre.' Stephen Greenblatt. What is the relation between literary and political power? How do the symbolic dimensions of social practice and the social dimensions of artistic practice relate to one another? Power on Display considers Shakespeare's progression from romantic comedies and history plays to tragedy and romance in the light of the general process of cultural change in the period.
Sovereignty and the Form of Formlessness Armstrong, Nancy; Tennenhouse, Leonard
Differences (Bloomington, Ind.),
07/2009, Letnik:
20, Številka:
2-3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
This essay argues that sovereignty, both the form of government and the law it constitutes, can be understood in terms of what it keeps out and at bay-namely, historically specific forms of ...formlessness. Assuming that formlessness does indeed have a form, the authors see it emerging in Jacobean tragedy whenever something happens to the body of the legitimate monarch and poses a threat to culture itself, endangering kinship along with the metaphysics of kingship. In Hobbes's
, sovereignty is no longer immanent in nature and the order of the universe itself but is a purely cultural or, in Hobbes's phrase, "artificial" thing. Hobbes designs the figure of Leviathan to render unthinkable the possibility of a many-headed body politic. Rather than set Hobbes in opposition to Locke and Defoe, who together arguably inaugurate the Enlightenment, the authors contend that such modern notions of self-sovereignty are defensive formations, responding to the same pressure of the multitude that shapes
is Gilbert, Louis, and Edward Lehrman Professor of English at Duke University. Her books include
(Oxford University Press, 1987),
(Harvard University Press, 1999),
(Columbia University Press, 2005), and, with Leonard Tennenhouse,
(University of California Press, 1992). She edits the journal
is Professor and Chair of English at Duke University and author of
(Routledge, 1986),
(Princeton University Press, 2007), and, with Nancy Armstrong,
(University of California Press, 1992). He has edited four collections, including a special issue of
s.
Is There An Early American Novel? TENNENHOUSE, LEONARD
Novel : a forum on fiction,
10/2006, Letnik:
40, Številka:
1-2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
James Fenimore Cooper's frontier fiction lends itself to allegorical readings about the founding of a nation at once masculine and American in origin. An obvious tautology informs all such readings: ...if novels are about history--or should be, in order to qualify as the genuine American article--then one must look to history to discover what these novels are about.
DIASPORA AND EMPIRE Tennenhouse, Leonard
The Importance of Feeling English,
02/2009
Book Chapter
At the risk of stating the obvious, let me begin by asserting that any discussion of American literature will at some point have to address the questions of how soon and in what respects British ...Americans began to think of themselves as American rather than British. Instead of assuming that different national governments mean different national literatures, I come to this problem from the contrary perspective: that the separation of American from British literatures is still at issue and was therefore nothing like the clean break that we tend to project backward onto the late eighteenth century.¹ I plan to
THE SENTIMENTAL LIBERTINE Tennenhouse, Leonard
The Importance of Feeling English,
02/2009
Book Chapter
The sentimental tradition is central to American letters. For reasons that should become clear in this chapter, American writers chose, and perhaps still choose, to write either within that tradition ...or against it. Even when they wrote against it, such writers had to draw on the plots, characters, and language associated with the sentimental tradition in order to take issue with it. Literary criticism has attributed this appeal not only to sentimentalism’s overt political import but also to its ability to divert attention from the public sphere. Critics have both celebrated sentimental literature for demonstrating democratic virtues by creating fellow
From the Declaration of Independence until well after the War of 1812, authors and intellectuals writing in English in the United States debated the relationship between language and national ...identity. This debate ranged widely over philological, linguistic, and aesthetic matters and took up the question of what consequences might ensue from the political break with Britain: Was the Revolution only a political rupture, or did it require revolutionary arts of cultural and linguistic self-definition as well? The majority of modern scholars take the position that, yes, in order to be a nation, an emergent political order must establish its own
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