This dissertation adopts a transatlantic frame of reference to argue that literary representations of local community shaped cultural identity in colonial British America and the early United States between 1720 and 1820. Supported by a commercial rhetoric that valorized tropes of circulation and exchange, locality emerged as an idiom for describing similarities among distinct places and people in the Anglophone world. Sensitive to their distance from established European cultural centers, early American writers continually responded in their work to charges of provinciality. I argue that the discourse of locality developed by these writers played a crucial role in regulating the perceived divisions between metropolitan cultural centers and places viewed as provincial outposts. Indeed, locality offered American writers a means of legitimating their cultural position with regard to established norms of taste and social refinement in the Anglophone world. Chapter 1 examines writing by the Maryland poet Richard Lewis in conjunction with James Thomson's The Seasons, and proposes that the distinctive mercantile aesthetic employed by both writers offers a means of conceiving the English nation according to the differences between imagined centers and peripheries. Turning to James Grainger's The Sugar-Cane, Chapter 2 focuses on the connection between aesthetics and empire to show how locality became a prerequisite for the cosmopolitan identities on which the self-authorizing myths of British imperial identity depended. Chapter 3 reads Olaudah Equiano's engagement with contemporary theories of locality in The Interesting Narrative to demonstrate how commerce and aesthetics in antislavery writing reworked the rhetoric of local identification to speak of personhood outside the limitations of property and labor imposed by slavery. Finally, Chapter 4 argues that Washington Irving's representation of discrete local communities in The Sketch Book invoked provinciality as a concept that was crucial to producing a sense of national cohesion in a changing world.
Melson, John A.,
"Aesthetics in Place: Commercial Rhetoric and Local Identity in the British Atlantic, 1720-1820"
(2010).
English Theses and Dissertations.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://doi.org/10.7301/Z0TH8JXF
