The most significant challenge came from Scotland. In the eighteenth century, bookmakers at the height of the Scottish Enlightenment produced editions of equal elegance and importance to their peers in London. In the early nineteenth century, the Scottish trade exploded, as Archibald Constable and William Blackwood launched a series of enterprising publishing ventures, including Constable’s Edinburgh Review, founded in 1802; Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, founded in 1817; and the careers of Walter Scott and a constellation of other Scottish authors, all of which, as Ian Duncan has written, “made Edinburgh a literary metropolis to rival London.”44 Dublin, whose book trade was severely curtailed by the Act of Union, and Philadelphia, Boston, and New York, whose bourgeoning trades depended mostly on reprints, did not mount the kind of opposition Edinburgh mustered. Despite this, however, there persisted in Scotland what Jane Millgate has aptly called “the problem of London.”45 London capitalization and partnership enabled the most ambitious Scottish publishing ventures, including Constable’s and Blackwood’s, and the great majority of Edinburgh-printed books were sent to London for sale and distribution. The Edinburgh Review only mattered, after all, because it left Edinburgh. In the 1820s, moreover, London publishers still issued over 80 percent of new titles within Britain as a whole.46 The state of the book trade varied from place to place and changed significantly over time; London’s dominance was not uniform or monolithic. However, Irish, Scottish, and American authors, readers, and booksellers saw themselves as allies in the literary field and experienced and expressed their subordination in strikingly similar ways. By the 1820s, these similarities were increasingly apparent as provincial literature formed an intertwined and recognizable sector of the market.
The effects of provinciality in many ways confirm Pascale Casanova’s provocative extension of Bourdieu in The World Republic of Letters (2004) to describe the cultural geography of “world literary space.”47 Casanova organizes such space along a continuum of dominant and dominated areas, where literary resources are unevenly distributed between the cultural capitals at the centers of the oldest, most established literary nations and impoverished peripheral nations defined by their “aesthetic distance” from such capitals.48 Authors from dominated nations seek out publication and recognition in the major centers of literary production, “where literary prestige and belief converge in the highest degree.”49 Literary resources are concentrated in those cities whose economies sustain both the production of books and the social world of practitioners who foster debate about the meaning of “literature” itself. Casanova’s paradigmatic literary center is modernist Paris, a city whose consecrating authority organized world literary space into rivalries and divisions remarkably non-coincident with the uneven power relations that define the international socioeconomic order.50 In the early nineteenth century, London dominated its linguistic field with the kind of centralized authority Paris claimed, globally, a century later, but of course no two literary capitals are exactly alike. The importance of translation in modernist Paris did not obtain in a monolingual context, even though Irish, Scottish, and American authors presented their cultures to England in a process James Buzard, referring to Waverley, has called “translation without original.”51 More significantly, London’s authority in the nineteenth century, unlike Paris’s in the twentieth, did indeed overlap with its political and economic dominance as the capital of empire; London, unlike Paris, incorporated marketplace triumphs into its vision of literary excellence (as I have already mentioned), and London, unlike Paris, did not require peripheral authors to reject local literary taste for the sake of a universal standard. Despite these differences, conceiving of an author’s distance from London as “aesthetic distance” has many advantages. It moves beyond the political determinism that has governed the study of Irish, Scottish, and American literature at least since Katie Trumpener’s Bardic Nationalism (1997) expanded the Romantic canon under the rubric of empire and the rise of ideology critique made complicity or resistance to the hegemonic U.S. nation-state the most pressing question in American literary studies. The specific Bourdieuian agenda of Casanova’s model also offers a concrete vision of literary competition that encourages us to eschew easy myths of cosmopolitanism to mark the tightly wound rivalries that inspired the undeniably Anglo-centric authors, booksellers, and readers in this study. Provincial literature was not circumscribed by national boundaries, nor did it transcend them; it flourished through the specific kind of cross-cultural struggle the literary field required.
How did Anglophone provincials fit into world literature, writ large (if we assume, with Casanova, that it exists)? On the most basic level, they were participants and contributors. Edgeworth, Owenson, Scott, Irving, and Cooper all engaged with a multilingual European culture made available to them through the importation of books, translation, and reprinting, as well as their own travels. Their works were translated into multiple foreign languages and often published abroad. Edgeworth was particularly admired in Russia, Irving in Spain, Cooper in Germany, and all of these authors in neighboring France. Scott’s unparalleled impact on world literature can be seen in the spread of the historical novel as a global genre, from Japan to Brazil. Goethe coined the term Weltliteratur in the 1820s to describe an international literary marketplace that Marx and Engels later traced to the rise of the bourgeoisie.52 As market-savvy professionals with thoroughly bourgeois values, the authors of this study fared so well in that marketplace, it may even seem like they weren’t provincial at all. Yet the Romantic dream (or nightmare) of Weltliteratur, evidenced broadly in dissemination and influence, did not affect their formative struggle within the predominantly Anglophone marketplace that was the arena of their initial consecration. This book is concerned with that initial stage, the material conditions of its possibility, and the influential provincial aesthetics it inspired.
The Aesthetics of Provinciality
A paradox recurs throughout modernity: that a great work of literature is both particular and universal, that it arises from a distinct context defined by a unique worldview with its own internal values, and also that it transcends that context, that worldview, and those values. This is a cliché in our own multicultural times, one repeated in cultural contexts high and low, in countless book reviews and citations for literary awards. It is a paradox and not a simple contradiction because the opposed concepts mutually inform each other in a profoundly circular logic: the representation of particularity provides access to universal truth while universality accrues meaning and importance to the particular. Early nineteenth-century provincials wrote in an era during which the “nation” occupied a privileged relationship to both sides of this paradoxical coin. Literature was newly understood to be particularly national in its essence and, as such, an expression of what makes all nations part of universal human nature. This conception of literature was both attractive to Irish, Scottish, and American authors and deeply problematic. It was attractive because they could fashion themselves in the London marketplace as national spokespersons and their work as nationally distinctive. It was problematic because metropolitan readers were skeptical that representations of Irish, Scottish, or American national particularity had any purchase whatsoever on universality, partly because of English chauvinism but more profoundly because as sociopolitical entities, Ireland, Scotland, and the United States did not fit seamlessly into the category of the nation as the ideology of cultural nationalism defined it. Dependence on London ensured that these inescapable difficulties persisted, and it was out of such difficulties that the aesthetics of provinciality emerged.
Caught in an impossible wish that their works be accepted as both national and universal, provincial authors offered powerful claims for the unique place of literature in society. These claims developed out