Spengemann is quite explicit: when we look at the colonial period as language, the pressure of America will reveal itself in everything from an increase in vocabulary having to do with America, to persistent allusions, tropes, and figures, as well as specific literary references, representations, and character types. Another chapter compares Franklin's Autobiography, Blake's "Marriage of Heaven and Hell," and Austen's Northanger Abbey as the work of authors who stand at the "threshold of the Nineteenth Century, that period in the American history of English literature during which the energies emanating from the New World would gradually displace the fixed forms of the Old World" (206).