Handbook of Transatlantic North American Studies

Julia Straub

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9783110376371
• eBook ISBN: 9783110393415
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Transatlantic literary studies have provided important new perspectives on North American, British and Irish literature. They have led to a revision of literary history and the idea of a national literature. They have changed the perception of the Anglo-American literary market and its many processes of transatlantic production, distribution, reception and criticism. Rather than dwelling on comparisons or engaging with the notion of 'influence, ' transatlantic literary studies seek to understand North American, British and Irish literature as linked with each other by virtue of multi-layered historical and cultural ties and pay special attention to the many refractions and mutual interferences that have characterized these traditions since colonial times.

This handbook brings together articles that summarize some of the crucial transatlantic concepts, debates and topics. The contributions contained in this volume examine periods in literary and cultural history, literary movements, individual authors as well as genres from a transatlantic perspective, combining theoretical insight with textual analysis.

Part ILiterary Movements and Key Periods in a Transatlantic Perspective

Clemens Spahr

1The Colonial Period

Abstract: The chapter discusses the colonial imagination of early American literature. After a brief introduction to the historical particularities of early American literature, the article introduces key theoretical concepts that have recently helped readjust scholarly discussions about the transatlantic dimension of colonial American literature. From this perspective, it then engages key texts by John Winthrop, Jonathan Edwards, and Benjamin Franklin. The article discusses which functions early American literature fulfilled in colonial America, and how these texts’ various contexts shaped their colonial imagination.

Key Terms: Colonial period, British America, New England Puritanism, early American literature

1The Literature of British America

William Spengemann’s 1983 article “Discovering the Literature of British America” concisely outlined the terms for discussions about the place of colonial American literature in transatlantic cultural history. Although slightly dated in its assertion of the necessity to expand the archive of colonial literature, a claim that originated before electronic databases such as Early American Imprints and Early English Books Online were widely accessible, the article’s reflections on what early American literature actually is can still help us think about the field. Spengemann took issue with the very names commonly used to refer to the literature of colonial America. According to Spengemann, both “Colonial American literature” and “Early American literature” imply that texts written and published in colonial America were simply the primitive, unrefined “prelude” (1983, 8) to a more advanced, refined form of literature that emerged with the professionalized literary landscape of the late-eighteenth and the nineteenth century and, most importantly, with the American Renaissance in the nineteenth century. Spengemann provocatively claims that for most literary historians at the time, and especially those unfamiliar with the variety and breadth of early American literature, “early American literature owes its significance to what came later, that Hawthorne alone makes John Winthrop worth the attention of literary scholars” (1983, 5). “Early,” “Colonial,” and “American” – these are terms that problematically read the literature of the American colonies from the perspective of later historical developments. Instead of reading colonial American literature as a predecessor of later literary figures such as the American Romantics, and instead of interpreting its social and political content from the perspective of a later American nationality – a nationality that simply does not exist in the seventeenth century – colonial American literature should be understood “according to its own peculiar situation, rather than in relation to American literature as a whole, whose center of gravity lies outside our period, in a significantly different world” (1983, 8).

Since Spengemann’s article was published, the textual archive of colonial American literature has been considerably expanded in a prospering field of early American Studies, which is reflected in comprehensive anthologies (cf. Jehlen and Warner 1997). In this context, literary scholars have followed historians in their insistence on the diversity of colonial America. While New England was the sole focus of literary scholarship for large parts of the twentieth century, historians have increasingly stressed the importance of the middle colonies (Delaware, New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania), some of them arguing that its cultural diversity “anticipated the American future” (Taylor 2001, 272; cf. Bonomi 1973; Greene 1988). Similarly, the Southern colonies have been included in histories of colonial America, with Jack Greene even stating that these colonies “epitomized […] the most important element in the emerging British-American culture: the conception of America as a place in which free people could pursue their own individual happiness in safety and with a fair prospect that they might be successful in their several quests” (1988, 5). This scholarship can be utilized to address Spengemann’s demand that we emphasize the diversity and local historical specificity of the “literature of British America.”

That colonial America needs to be understood from a transatlantic perspective is almost self-evident for any scholar and student of early American literature and culture, as documents of America’s early history can simply not be disconnected from their various European contexts. But recent directions in historiography and literary history have suggested that it might be necessary to think about the literature of British America from an even broader perspective. Ralph Bauer has argued that even this extension of the archive of resources often “reinforced the notion of the nation as the organizing principle of literary studies” (Bauer 2009, 818; for a good example of such a hemispheric approach, cf. Bauer 1997). Bauer’s assertion is in line with recent attempts to write the history of colonial America from theoretical perspectives such as Atlantic history or world-system analysis (

0 Introduction). Fernand Braudel’s concept of the Mediterranean as a space of cultural, political, and economic exchange that links individual nations to each other and makes it impossible to understand history predominantly within the framework of the nation has informed Bernard Bailyn’s notion of an Atlantic history that views the history of British America and, later, the United States as inextricably linked to the Atlantic world (cf. Bailyn 2005, Armitage and Braddick 2009, Bailyn and Denault 2009, and Greene and Morgan 2009). Similarly, the Annales School, to which Braudel belonged, coined the phrase of the longue durée, thus intending to emphasize the economic, political, social, and cultural continuities of Western history (cf. Braudel 1995). This notion, in turn, was adopted by Immanuel Wallerstein and other proponents of worlds-systems analysis to highlight structural continuities in the development of global capitalism since the late fifteenth century and to argue for the centrality of the conquest of the New World for the establishment of the world-system (cf. Wallerstein 2004; Braudel 1995). All of these approaches require us to see colonial America within a web of transatlantic and, indeed, global economic, social, and political relations.

The transatlantic approach pursued in the following article seeks to incorporate recent theories and analyses that have highlighted how much work remains to be done on the cultural, social, and economic relationships established during America’s colonial period. Even though these approaches can be problematic in their generalizations, and even though they frequently tempt literary and cultural historians into free-wheeling contextual, ‘global’ analyses that often miss the specificity of local political and social developments as well as the formal and rhetorical workings of texts, they force us to read individual historical events, texts, and cultural documents with reference to a larger historical totality. The literature of colonial America, then, expresses particular ideas and ideologies; but these always respond to a system that transcends geographical, political, and institutional boundaries. Moreover, these approaches stress how the colonization, settlement, and exploitation of the ‘new’ world and the cultural encounters and hierarchies involved in this expansion (cf. Jehlen 1994) were the beginning of modernity. Of course, all of these approaches insist that the New World was not new, but populated by Native Americans who, since their migration from Asia to North America (30,000–11,000 B. C.), had developed their own complex social systems, their own civilizations, and were often engaged in their own complex conflicts. But the arrival of Europeans connected the world in a way that created the global socioeconomic formation that has shaped the modern world. Wallerstein consequently argues that “three things were essential to the establishment of […] a capitalist world-economy: an expansion of the geographical size of the world in question, the development of variegated methods of labor control for different products and different zones of the world-economy, and the creation of relatively strong state machineries in what would become the core-states of this capitalist world-economy” (2011 [1974], 38).

The following chapter is based on these insights in that it presents the three texts it discusses – John Winthrop’s “A Modell of Christian Charity” (1630), Jonathan Edwards’s Personal Narrative (c.1739), and Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography (1791) – as attempts to deal with the conditions of a colonial America firmly related to Europe and global social, economic, and political processes, and firmly involved in a transatlantic cultural and political exchange. The article will not provide an exhaustive history or even the historical outlines of the colonial period. There are accessible, detailed recent histories that provide precisely such a historical survey of the cultural, religious, social, political, and economic dimensions of colonial America (cf. Taylor 2001 and 2012; Middleton and Lombard 2011). Its focus is more narrowly and perhaps more concisely on a representative sample of texts that allows us to understand the role and function of early American literature in colonial American culture and society. The following reading of texts by John Winthrop, Jonathan Edwards, and Benjamin Franklin, three canonized writers that have received much attention, is not supposed to highlight the importance of great men that shape history, an assumption that has been thoroughly refuted by social historians that stress how elite discourses often do not correspond to the social dynamics of, for instance, small towns (cf. Clark 1990; Norton 1980; Raphael 2001). It rather highlights the social and cultural tensions and paradoxes their writings express both consciously and unconsciously.

The fact that all three texts also have complicated publication histories helps us understand the function of literature and culture in the colonial period more properly. The literature of colonial America must not be read by contemporary aesthetic standards – not because it was inferior, but because it simply had a different function. This is not to say that colonial early American literature lacks refinement. Robert Daly has demonstrated that Puritan poetry was aesthetically complex, and yet, it should not be confused with the modern and modernist aesthetic criteria that have been canonized in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (cf. Daly 1978; see also Hammond 1993, Spahr 2010, and Scheiding and Seidl 2015 on the aesthetics and cultural function of early American texts). And yet, in the colonial period literature was not so much defined as a semi-autonomous work of art, but rather as a form of representation directed at a public audience, often with an immediate purpose in mind. Even “private” or “personal” texts such as Edwards’s and Franklin’s autobiographies or Anne Bradstreet’s private poems always had a religious or political intent. Michael Warner reminds us that the conditions of literary production changed dramatically: “In 1500, English was written by a small class of people in an island kingdom on the margin of Europe. By 1800, it was the language of a colonial system that stretched around the earth, from India and Australia to the Caribbean and Newfoundland” (1997, xvii). Although these circumstances changed, from the outset the literature of British America expressed the realities of the colonial period and tried to intervene in the colonial imagination that underlay the American colonies.

2The Colonial Imagination

The exploration, colonization, and settlement of the Americas were driven by religious as well as economic interests. Portuguese and Spanish conquest and colonization of the Americas aimed at quick profit and the exploitation of resources, but Christopher Columbus (1451–1506), a devout Catholic, also sought to convert New World inhabitants to Christianity. For Columbus, economic considerations and religious conversion at all costs went hand in hand. Travel accounts of these early encounters – both those based on experience such as Columbus’s widely distributed, immensely influential first journal of his voyage (1492–1493) and those of a largely fictional nature – project a colonial imagination with which many later settlers would arrive in the New World. In his Discourse Concerning Western Planting (1584), Richard Hakluyt (1553–1616) argued that the British Empire should colonize the New World to establish colonies with which they could trade goods rather than rely on Spain, to create work for their poor in the colonies, and to convert ‘Indians’ to spread Christianity. The Americas were presented as a land of plenty, but the voyage to what Europeans saw as the New World was also presented as a dangerous venture into the unknown. These promotional texts often mixed literary embellishment with empirical observations and political intentions. The imaginative elements are sometimes stereotypes about the Americas, their conditions, and their native inhabitants, and sometimes rhetorical strategies to convince an audience of the necessity of colonization and settlement. Most of the time, all of these interests intersect to create a colonial imagination that underlay the settler’s social practices.

The early Spanish colonization of America was characterized by conflicts with Native Americans and the ruthless exploitation of resources. English settlements in North America generally sought to trade with native populations, and frequently stressed that peaceful conversion and hard labor for profit distinguished their endeavor from ruthless Spanish colonization. John Smith (1580–1631), one of the governors of the Virginia Colony established in Jamestown in 1607, made it clear that America was a fruitful place for those willing to work hard and cultivate the land. But Smith’s self-involved, romanticized accounts of his encounters with American Indians still assumed their basic inferiority and asserted the need to convert them to Christianity; and indeed conflicts with Indians would remain part of the history of English settlements in the New World. In addition to these conflicts and the hostile circumstances that the settlers encountered, the settlements were often plagued by internal tensions. In The Generall Historie of Virginia (1624), Smith promoted his colony by asserting that in Virginia everyone could find their fortune if they were industrious enough: “if he have nothing but his hands, he may set up his Trade; and by industry quickly grow rich” (210). Seven years later, in Advertisements for the Unexperienced Planters of New England, or Any where (1631), he recommended that those settling the area of New England should avoid some of the mistakes that had plagued the Virginia Colony, where quick profit often assumed primacy over industrious colonization; “one hundred good labourers” would be better “than a thousand such Gallants as were sent me, that could do nothing but complaine, curse, and despaire, when they saw our miseries” (Smith 1631, 5).

The colonial imagination was characterized by a missionary zeal, both economically and religiously, but also had to come to terms with hostile circumstances and European migrations as well as political influences often beyond their control. A similar oscillation between assertion and doubt can be detected in William Bradford’s monumental history Of Plymouth Plantation (1630–1651). After a long journey through Europe the Pilgrims decided that there was no use to hope for regener...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Editors’ Preface
• Copyright
• 0 Introduction: Transatlantic North American Studies
• Part I Literary Movements and Key Periods in a Transatlantic Perspective
• Part II The Transatlantic Author
• Part III Transatlantic Aesthetics: Genres, Styles, Debates
• Part IV Transatlantic Media Cultures
• Part V Writing the Black Atlantic
• Part VI Transatlantic Afterlives: Reception Histories
• Part VII Transatlantic Canadian Studies
• Part VIII Widening the Transatlantic Sphere
• Index of Subjects
• Index of Names
• List of Contributors
• Footnotes