The New Nation: Irving, Cooper, and the First American Fiction

This is Unit Six of American Literature, part two of two: the form the period settled into, the poets the country recited, and two ways of placing a passage you have never seen. Part one ended on the pirated Scott and Dickens that outsold every American book on the counter. Now the unit's governing idea pays off, because what this generation did with European forms is exactly what a reader has to recognize. The historical romance is the clearest case: Scott's invention, which sets made-up characters inside real events a generation or two back, and which gave a country with almost no past a usable one by construction. Longfellow did the same thing in verse, putting native and colonial legends into European meters that ordinary people could recite, and he was the best-known American poet of his day. Beneath both ran the Gothic, which had to be relocated because America had no castles, so it took the forest, the isolated house and the Puritan past, and turned its subject into inherited sin. Then two procedures: one that places a passage by the figure at its centre, and one that reads a landscape as an argument rather than as scenery. By the end you will be able to define the historical romance. To name the Brahmin poets and Longfellow's three long poems. To say how the Gothic was relocated. To place a text by its hero. And to read a Romantic landscape for scale, figure and direction of change.

Four entries on what the period settled into: one form, three household poets, and the dark strain arriving underneath them.

Invented people, inside real history.

AML 0518 The Historical Romance as a Form

The historical romance sets invented characters inside real events, usually a generation or two back, and lets a nation examine its own founding at a safe distance. Scott supplied the model, Cooper naturalized it, and the form let American writers claim a past for a country that had very little of one. The form supplies a usable past by construction.

Harvard, and a nation's household poet.

AML 0519 Longfellow and the Boston Brahmins

The witness names Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes and James Russell Lowell as the most important Boston Brahmin poets. Longfellow, a professor of modern languages at Harvard, was the best-known American poet of his day, credited with a legendary sense of the past. The witness's term for the group is Brahmin rather than Fireside.

Three legends, in borrowed meters.

AML 0520 *Evangeline*, *Hiawatha*, and the National Myth

Longfellow wrote three long narrative poems putting native and colonial legends into European meters: "Evangeline" in eighteen forty-seven, "The Song of Hiawatha" in eighteen fifty-five, and "The Courtship of Miles Standish" in eighteen fifty-eight. They gave the country a legendary past in verse people could recite. The witness calls that sense of the past ahistorical.

No castles: a forest and a family.

AML 0521 The Gothic Arrives in America

The Gothic brings ruin, secret guilt, madness and the returning dead, and American writers had to import the machinery and then find native ground for it. Without castles they used the forest, the isolated house and the Puritan past, which is why American Gothic so often concerns inherited sin. The American version relocates guilt into history.

Three entries to close: a procedure that places a passage by its central figure, one that reads a landscape, and the unit's capstone.

Name the figure; the form follows.

AML 0522 Placing an Early National Text by Its Hero

A passage from this period can usually be placed by the kind of figure at its centre, and four types cover the field. The idler or eccentric, comic and out of step with a changing community, belongs to Irving's sketches and their imitators, and the tone will be genial. The frontiersman, expert outside settlements and awkward inside them, belongs to Cooper's romances and their descendants, and the prose will admire competence. The isolated sufferer, carrying a secret or a guilt, belongs to the Gothic and to the dark Romantics of the next unit, and the setting will be closed rather than open. The endangered young woman, pursued and instructed by a moralizing narrator, belongs to the seduction novel of the previous generation. Name the figure and the form usually follows. The types overlap at the edges, and the exam builds distractors there: a frontiersman inside a haunted forest is still Cooper's kind of book if the danger is human, and still Gothic if the danger is inherited.

Scale, the figure, the direction.

AML 0523 Reading a Romantic Landscape

Romantic writers make landscape carry argument, and three questions get at it. First, what scale is the scene: a vast, overwhelming prospect is working the sublime and will be attached to awe, fear or the presence of something larger, while a composed, irregular, pleasing one is picturesque and will be attached to contentment or nostalgia. Second, what is the human figure doing in it: a solitary observer means the passage is about a mind, while a settlement in view means it is about what people do to places. Third, what is the direction of change: Romantic American landscapes are usually described as vanishing, and the passage will register that loss as either tragic or inevitable. That last question is the one the exam asks most, because it separates celebration from elegy. Do not read a description of wilderness as neutral scene-setting, since in this period a forest is almost always an argument about what settlement costs.

Borrowed forms, on native ground.

AML 0524 Inventing an American Literature: What the First Novelists Did

The generation after the Revolution faced a practical problem: a country with a politics of its own and no literature to match, competing in its own bookshops against free British novels, and unsure whether an American book should sound different from an English one at all. What they built was an answer by relocation rather than by invention. Irving took German folklore, Walter Scott's advice and the eighteenth-century periodical essay and set them in the Hudson Valley behind a comic persona, producing in *The Sketch Book* the first American book to win an international audience. His two famous tales show the method exactly. "Rip Van Winkle" sleeps a man through the Revolution so that a village's changed signboard can carry the whole political transformation, and "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" offers a headless horseman and a rival with a pumpkin and refuses to choose between them. Cooper took Scott's historical romance and gave it a forest, a war and a frontiersman who is at once a natural aristocrat and a man who cannot live in a town. Natty Bumppo becomes the first American hero, and the Leatherstocking novels make the vanishing wilderness a subject while treating its vanishing as fate. Bryant made blank verse carry an American landscape and a consolation drawn from nature rather than scripture. Longfellow put legends into European meters and supplied a past to recite. Underneath all of it ran a trade in which pirated Scott and Dickens outsold everyone.

That closes the new nation. The next unit takes the movement that argued with all of it. You can define the historical romance as invented characters set inside real events a generation or two back, and say that it supplies a young country with a usable past by construction. You can name Longfellow, Holmes and Lowell as the Boston Brahmin poets, using the witness's term rather than the more familiar one, and you can place Longfellow's three long narrative poems, which put native and colonial legends into European meters for a country that wanted something to recite. You can say how the Gothic came to America without castles and took the forest, the isolated house and the Puritan past instead, so that its real subject became inherited sin. You can place a passage by asking whether its central figure is an idler, a frontiersman, an isolated sufferer or an endangered young woman. And you can read a landscape by asking its scale, what the human figure is doing in it, and which direction it is changing, because in this period a forest is an argument about what settlement costs. Unit seven takes Transcendentalism.