Common Place: Rereading 'Nation' in the Quoting Age, 1776-1860 Anitta
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Common Place: Rereading ‘Nation’ in the Quoting Age, 1776-1860 Anitta C. Santiago Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2014 © 2014 Anitta C. Santiago All rights reserved ABSTRACT Common Place: Rereading ‘Nation’ in the Quoting Age, 1776-1860 Anitta C. Santiago This dissertation examines quotation specifically, and intertextuality more generally, in the development of American/literary culture from the birth of the republic through the Civil War. This period, already known for its preoccupation with national unification and the development of a self-reliant national literature, was also a period of quotation, reprinting and copying. Within the analogy of literature and nation characterizing the rhetoric of the period, I translate the transtextual figure of quotation as a protean form that sheds a critical light on the nationalist project. This project follows both how texts move (transnational migration) and how they settle into place (national naturalization). Combining a theoretical mapping of how texts move and transform intertextually and a book historical mapping of how texts move and transform materially, I trace nineteenth century examples of the culture of quotation and how its literary mutability both disrupts and participates in the period’s national and literary movements. In the first chapter, I engage scholarship on republican print culture and on republican emulation to interrogate the literary roots of American nationalism in its transatlantic context. Looking at commonplace books, autobiographies, morality tales, and histories, I examine how quotation as a practice of memory impression functions in national re-membering. In the second chapter, I follow quotation in early nineteenth-century national and literary contests of space and fashioning, the movement for international copyright in the culture of reprinting and the calls for a national literature. The third chapter considers questions of appropriation, assimilation, and translation in hemispheric poetic interactions within the context of the annexation and Manifest Destiny. The last chapter examines quotation in the antebellum period where, in the absence of a unifying authority, the fragments of quotation offer a way to tell the story of the nation. TABLE OF CONTENTS 1. Acknowledgments ………………………………………………………………………iii 2. Dedication ………………………………………………………………………………..v 3. Introduction ……………..……………………………………………………………….1 4. Chapter 1- Deep Impressions: Re-membering (Com)Patriots Framing Contests: Quotation in America, America in Quotation………...……………..11 Memory-Building: Commonplace Books and the Order of Fragments………..………..20 Fit Impressions: Genre and the Impression of Memory and Morals…………...………..34 Discipline and Publish: National Confederation, Ambivalence Bound………….……...51 Re-membering Nathan Hale: Contesting Last Words…………….……………………..62 5. Chapter 2- Make Way: Fashionable Entrée, American Space, and the Mutability of Naturalization From Rags to Riches, Riches to Rags: Irvings’ Literary Ecology………………………78 Characters in Costume: Anglo-America and the Fashionable Nation………..…………95 The Dandies Are Out: Dandiacal Traditions and National and Universal Pageant...103 Reforming the Dandy: Contests of Literary and National Character....……….……… 113 The Dandy in American Character…………………………………………………..…….. 124 Fashioning Nature: The Art of the Preserve and Righting Plots……………………….136 Game Laws and Property Rights: Naturalizing Preservation……………..…………… 142 Engendering a Neutral Ground: The Nature of Representation…………..…………... 151 Memorial Epigraphs: Hope Leslie and Resurrecting Plots …….…………………………. 160 i 6. Chapter 3- Manifest Translating: Assimilating Power in the Hemisphere and Parallel Encounters Passable Verses: The Homeric Questioning of American Originality and Influence.…170 Parallel Passages: Tracing Imitations and Literary Exposé…………………………….177 Stealing from the Spanish: Bryant, Mexico, and Cuba……………...………………….191 Traductor a Traductor: Bryant and Heredia, A Case Study…………………………….207 Longfellow’s Inverted Tree, Known By Its Hemispheric Fruit………………………...216 Rainy Day Men: Longfellow and Quintero, A Case Study…………………………….240 7. Chapter 4- Antiquarian Modernities: The Fragments of a Tradition Floating Fragments: Emerson and the Sources of Transcendental Originality Broken Vessels and Dismembered Deities: Quotation as Emersonian Originality…..2 49 An Other Problem: The National Failure of Quotation…………………………………. 257 Editing Cultures: The Quotation Books of Sarah Josepha Hale and John Bartlett……264 Sarah Hale’s American Presence and Erasure…………………………………………... 265 John Bartlett: A(n) (Un)familiar Authority………………………......…………………… 273 Give It Up, Sub-Subs!: A Final Word on Decomposition and Recomposition………...289 8. Epilogue …………………………...…………………………………………………...294 9. Bibliography ……………...……………………………………………………………300 ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS What nineteenth-century readers knew well was that all texts contain multiple influential presences, and I am pleased to say that this dissertation is no different. I am privileged to have had the most supportive, patient, and insightful dissertation committee imaginable. I thank my advisor Ross Posnock for being an encyclopedia of academic research, directing me to the scholarship that has most impacted my thinking, for his careful and generous reading and commenting on my drafts, and for his incredible patience, understanding, and never failing encouragement. I thank Sharon Marcus for making me a better writer (I still have much to learn from her), for her perspicacity in seeing my project more clearly than I did, for her always spot- on advice both on my scholarship and professional development, and for going out of her way to support me. I thank Lisa Gordis who has been instrumental in my formation as a scholar and a person, who first taught me to love early American literature, without whose encouragement I would not have even dreamed of graduate school, and whose confidence in my ideas slowly but surely helped me to develop my own. My heartfelt thanks go to Meredith McGill, whose scholarship has been so influential for this dissertation in particular and my thinking more generally, for her generous feedback with which to continue to develop this project as well as to T. Austin Graham for opening my eyes to more terrain for historical inquiry in this project. I thank Ezra Tawil, Jenny Davidson, the rest of the Eighteenth-Century Reading Group, with whom I was able to discuss the beginnings of this project, for their helpful advice and questions. I would also like to thank Gerald Cloud who helped me with my research on John Bartlett and the American publication history of silver-fork novels, as well as William Delgado at the Hispanic Society of America for his help with the Revista de la Habana. iii I thank all the professors I have had the honor to learn from here for being models of outstanding scholarship and teaching for emulation: Amanda Claybaugh, Julie Crawford, Michael Golston, Wen Jin, Shayne Legassie, Edward Mendelson, Julie Peters, Victoria Rosner, Clifford Siskin, Maura Spiegel, Gauri Viswanathan, and Nicole Wallack. Thank you to all the scholars whose work I have quoted or referenced in this dissertation. Many thanks, too, to all my fellow graduate students in the department who have recommended books, commiserated and advised. I thank my classmates in Professor Marcus’s article workshop for helping me to sort out my Bartlett research, and in particular, Olivia Moy and Jangwook Huh for their help and friendship. I am incredibly grateful and indebted to the consultants at the Writing Center, especially Katie McIntyre, without whom I might never have been able to pull off the final draft. Last, but by no means least, I thank my friends and family. Thanks to my friends from Coliseum Books, especially Mike Lindgren, Ron Kolm, and Conrad Brenner, for discussions on my dissertation texts at Muldoon’s and the Cloister Café. To Jennifer Ren for being a sounding board and helping me with French and German. To Father Martin Curtin and William and Mary Curtin for their spiritual and intellectual support. Thanks to everyone in the family who asked “how’s it going?” and showered me with prayers and love, especially my aunt Maria, my uncle Wilfredo, my cousin Michele, my Ramoses and “Uncle Victor.” To my little cousins Michael and Uriah and baby nephew Jayden for being a constant source of joy. I thank my brother Alan for allowing me to vent when I needed to and for always having ready words of wisdom or wit to keep me going, as well as my sister-in-law Tameka for her support. Most of all, I thank my mom, for ponche de café , for learning about dandies and listening to so many of my think-alouds, for those quotations that inspired me each day, and for being just about everything for me. iv DEDICATION To my grandmother Emilia Ramos Aguilar de Rivas who taught me the mainest lessons. v INTRODUCTION In John Steinbeck’s The Winter of Our Discontent , thirteen year-old Ellen asks her father Ethan Allen Hawley a question about “copying from books” as she and her brother write their essays for the National I Love America Contest. After instructing his daughter on the use of quotations, Ethan considers, “I guess half the writing in America is quotations, if it isn’t anthologies.” 1 The winner of the contest is Ethan’s son Allen, whose essay turns out to be a plagiarism, composed from his father’s anthologies of the great