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Leonard Tennenhouse, The Importance of Feeling English: American Literature and the British Diaspora, 1750–1850

Following on from The Imaginary Puritan (1992), a book he coauthored with Nancy Armstrong that influentially repositioned the early American novel on a transatlantic axis, Leonard Tennenhouse’s The Importance of Feeling English examines the formative influence of what he calls ‘‘the British Diaspora’’ on American literature in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. After an opening chapter that considers theoretically issues of ‘‘Diaspora and Empire’’ (1), Tennenhouse discusses how the politics of language were played out around the time of the Revolution, with specific reference to ways in which Samuel Johnson and Noah Webster conceptualized the task of ‘‘writing English in America’’ (19). Chapter 3 then focuses upon the figure of the ‘‘sentimental libertine’’ (43) and analyses how American versions of seduction stories differed from their British counterparts, while chapter 4 looks at the transformation of the ‘‘man of feeling’’ into ‘‘the strong, silent type,’’ a ‘‘form of masculinity,’’ argues Tennenhouse, ‘‘that we now consider uniquely American’’ (91). In the final chapter, Tennenhouse discusses how gothic metaphors were represented in the literature of the early republic, taking issue in particular with Leslie Fiedler’s nationalistic notion that the apparatus of medieval gothicism in novels such as Isaac Mitchell’s The Asylum (1811) was, in Fiedler’s term, ‘‘meaningless’’ (101). Tennenhouse argues instead for a version of ‘‘the gothic in diaspora’’ (94), whose valence derives not from local mimesis but from the transatlantic recirculation of aesthetic forms and genres. In general, Tennenhouse is very good on what he calls the ‘‘detours, disruptions, circularity, and exchanges’’ that keep ‘‘a diaspora alive and