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Transatlanticism and Reconceiving American Literature: Remapping the Early American Novel

In recent literary studies, transatlanticism has provided an important framework through which literary texts can be explored and re-explored. Transatlantic studies draws attention to the ways in which ideas of crossing and connection have helped to rethink the ways in which national identity is constructed. As Arjun Appadurai and Benedict Anderson have noted, modern nations are constructed as "imagined communities" through acts of collective imagination. The borders of a nation are now conceived to be permeable to the reciprocal flow of cultures. Transatlanticism serves as a way of unsettling our preconceived idea about the 'exceptional' American literature, not only as a geographic location of material and economic exchange, but also as a metaphor for the transmission of aesthetic and ideological forms. This paper attempts to suggest a possibility of reconceiving American Literature, drawing on the transatlantic perspective with a specific focus on the early American novel. The idea of the transatlantic is inseparable from early America in which exchange, migration and interaction were given conditions. Naturally, early American literature always concerned itself with relations and dialogues, despite the exceptionalist claims of earlier exponents of American Studies. So it is now necessary to review the critical argument that the rise of the American novel is closely intertwined with the emergence of the new nation. In the early Republic of America, homogeneity and singularity increasingly give way to transnational spaces of relation and hybridity. Seen in transatlantic perspective, then, it can be argued that the category of early American novel should be redefined to embrace novels with transatlantic dimension. The transatlnatic view thus, provides a way of opening up the canon of American literature to a much wider range of writing.