Trollope in America
Trollope and America i 6 attempted to make sense of the relations between the two nations. For the most part, these authors presented America and Britain as different from - AMANDA CLAYBAUGH and opposed to - one another, and their writings established the terms in which this difference would be described. American openness and British Trollope and America reserve, American energy and British leisure, American merchants and British gentlemen: these oppositions are familiar even in our own day. Each of these nations thus represented what the other was not, but each also represented what the other might yet choose to become. In the eyes of the British, as the critic Paul Giles has shown, America embodied the full flowering of a dissenting tradition that had begun with the English refor- mation and then migrated across the sea. As a consequence, America was The Trollope family made something of an industry of visiting America and frequently invoked, as both exemplar and as cautionary example, in British writing about it. In the late i8zos, Frances Trollope had gone to America in debates about religion and politics.1 In the eyes of the Americans, as the the hope of reviving the Trollope family fortunes. After trying and failing to critic Lawrence Buell has shown, Britain set a cultural standard against establish a business on the western frontier, she decided to become an which American achievements inevitably seemed inferior or, at best, author instead. She first published a book about her American travels, belated. For this reason, the most ambitious American authors, including The Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832), and then a novel, The the ones belonging to the American Renaissance, explicitly rebelled against Refugee in America (1832), and the success of these launched her on a the British and European authors whom they secretly feared they could not prolific career.
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