London and the Making of Provincial Literature. Joseph Rezek

ago called “a world elsewhere,” the belief that “through literature it is possible to create environments radically different from those supported by economic, political, and social systems.”⁵³ Such a retreat was always ideological, as the Marxist critique of bourgeois aesthetics insists. According to that critique, the commodification of literature and the expansion of the reading public in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries led to idealizations of aesthetic experience that reject the marketplace and claim independence for the work of art.⁵⁴ Irish, Scottish, and American authors insisted, too, that literary production and exchange is a relatively autonomous endeavor. In turning to London, however, they derived this idea from an embrace of the marketplace, rather than its denial. Their literary sphere is “autonomous” not because of a pure Kantian commitment to nonpurposive aesthetic judgment, nor because they denied the messy world of commodification, but more generally because of an insistence that literature operates according to its own laws. The aesthetics of provinciality consists of a range of representational modes, derived from geographically inflected cultural subordination, that vacillate between national and universal conceptions of art; it takes refuge in the belief that literature enjoys an exalted role in human affairs. Such a belief had roots in Enlightenment theories of taste and received new force with the rise of Romanticism.

      In many ways, Enlightenment thinkers provided hostile philosophical conditions for the provincial author who wished to represent his or her culture to English readers. A high premium was placed on resemblance. “[W]e are more pleased, in the course of our reading,” writes David Hume in “Of the Standard of Taste” (1757), “with pictures and characters, that resemble objects which are found in our own age or country, than with those which describe a different set of customs.”⁵⁵ For Hume and others, aesthetic pleasure derives partly from finding correspondences between one’s own experience (derived from the senses) and artistic representation.⁵⁶ For Joseph Addison, the secondary pleasures of the imagination—those reserved for the experience of art rather than nature—“originate from comparing ideas of an original object with those from some representation of it.”⁵⁷ Edmund Burke emphasized that for the imagination, “a pleasure is perceived from the resemblance, which the imitation has to the original.”⁵⁸ The classic works of antiquity achieved this because they were understood to imitate a universal human nature that transcended time and place. The scant praise eighteenth-century writers reserved for novelty did not override their general prejudice against particularity.

      Provincial authors found some solace in cultural nationalism, the view of Johann Gottfried Herder, as John Hutchinson describes it, that insists “the essence of a nation is its distinctive civilization, which is the product of its unique history, culture, and geographical profile.”⁵⁹ Germaine de Staël espoused this view in works that were widely disseminated throughout the Anglophone world, including Corinne; or, Italy (1807), a novel delineating Italian manners and customs, and De l’Allemagne (1810), a study of German culture and philosophy. Staël praised “indigenous” works of literature with deep connections to “national feeling.”⁶⁰ Buoyed by the increasing authority of vernacular works over the classics, cultural nationalism flourished through the logic of comparison. “Civilization continually tends to make all men look alike and almost really be alike,” Staël writes in Corinne, “but one’s mind and imagination delight in the differences which characterize nations.”⁶¹ Difference, in this view, rather than resemblance, accrues value to the literary. Such ideas were incorporated into provincial literature because of the exogenous address embedded even within the most insular expressions of national culture.

      Not everyone shared Staël’s delight in transnational comparison, however. Unfortunately for provincial authors, many English readers, critics, and booksellers continued to exult in their assumed superiority. A more fundamental problem was the association of nation with language. “In learning the prosody of a language,” writes Staël, in a very Herderian passage, “we enter more intimately into the spirit of the nation by which it is spoken than by any other possible manner of study.”⁶² It follows that nations without a language lack their own “spirit,” a problem elite Americans keenly felt after independence as they tried to found a national literature in the language of England. Irish and Scottish authors often enlisted dialect in the service of national distinctiveness, but dependence on London meant they could never fully leave English behind. English culture, meanwhile, silently absorbed cultural nationalism’s valuation of the vernacular through the familiar alchemy of making English seem universal. In his preface to Lyrical Ballads (1802), for example, Wordsworth’s “language really used by men” paradoxically invests an inherently local variant, English, with the general significance of “truth, not individual and local, but general, and operative.”⁶³ The provincial author could never make such silent and seamless claims about her chosen language of representation.

      The same Enlightenment thinkers invested in resemblance, however, also provided philosophical ground for the cross-cultural literary transaction. In “Of the Standard of Taste,” Hume articulated the values of the unbiased critic, who “must preserve his mind free from all prejudice.” “When any work is addressed to the public,” Hume writes, “though I should have a friendship or enmity with the author, I must depart from this situation; and considering myself as a man in general, forget, if possible, my individual being and my personal circumstances.”⁶⁴ Through transcending the contingences of the “personal,” Humean disinterest grants universality to the observer (“man in general”); this locates value not in representation but in the integrity of judgment.⁶⁵ Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) provided a model of sympathy that complemented the selflessness of Hume’s ideal critic. Smith’s model, almost immediately absorbed as a theory of literature, not only encouraged the spectator or reader to forget his or her own personal interests through identifying with the other but endowed such identification with the highest moral value. “And hence it is,” Smith writes, “that to feel much for others and little for ourselves, that to restrain our selfish, and to indulge our benevolent affections, constitutes the perfection of human nature.”⁶⁶ Provincial authors appealed to the “benevolent affections” of metropolitan readers in heavily aestheticized Smithian gestures. These appeals shaped the kind of cross-cultural communion they imagined could overcome distance and national difference.⁶⁷

      Cross-cultural communion occurred in the very limited sphere of the literary. As John Guillory and Clifford Siskin have argued, by the Romantic period, the category of “literature” had disaggregated from other realms of culture.⁶⁸ The aesthetics of provinciality helped define the terms of this disaggregation by claiming for literature its own values and rules. Provincial authors banished politics and prejudice to promote literary exchange as a peaceful elite activity—what Siskin calls the “pleasurable familiarity of Literature.”⁶⁹ That activity mingled Enlightenment ideals of disinterest and sympathy with a more quintessentially Romantic ideology that insists products of the imagination exist entirely for their own sakes. Literary exchange was imagined to be isolated, protected, and supervised according to rules only specialized practitioners could determine and fulfill. “Exchange” was, indeed, paramount, given the importance of cross-cultural communion, and its necessity marks an obvious difference between the aesthetics of provinciality and a Kantian or Coleridgean notion of aesthetic form as organic or nonpurposive. But even Kant, in the Critique of Judgment (1790), grants aesthetic pleasure a purpose once it is joined with the idea of communication. Regarding “the judgment of taste,” Kant writes that “it does not follow that after it has been given as a pure aesthetic judgment no interest can be combined with it.”⁷⁰ The highest form of interest that can be added to such a judgment is appreciation of its “universal communicability,” which “almost infinitely increases its value” through demonstrating an “inclination to society.”⁷¹ The value of a judgment’s universal communicability—tied to Kant’s “common sense”—gives a social function to aesthetics that admits into its compass relations among persons. “In the sphere of aesthetic culture,” Terry Eagleton writes, with regard to the Kantian imaginary, “we can experience our shared humanity.”⁷² Kant never describes pure aesthetic judgment as anything other than a priori determined, but the added indirect value of universal communicability