| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 95.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 95.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Importance of Feeling English: American Literature and the British Diaspora, 1750–1850. By Leonard Tennenhouse. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007. xii, 158 pp. $35.00, ISBN 978-0-691-09681-0.)

Leonard Tennenhouse builds on recent scholarship on early American writing—post-colonial, transatlantic, and book history—to argue, against conventional wisdom, that early U.S. culture did not break from English culture so much as perpetuate it with a twist. "American" identity emerged by enabling Britons in North America to continue to "feel" English. The concept of a British diaspora structures the book's central assumptions: that novels and poetry (reading tastes as well as literary production) offer unique insights into cultural transmission and change; that American reading and writing should be mapped within transatlantic circulation; and that motivations for such literary habits derived from the threat of being culturally cut off from the mother country.

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