Transamerican Literary Relations and the Nineteenth-Century Public Sphere (review)

• Published in: Hispanic review 2006-04, Vol.74 (2), p.216-220
• Main Author: Montaldo, Graciela R
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: 19th century; Cooper, James Fenimore (1789-1851); Metaphor; Nonfiction; Politics
• ISSN: 0018-2176; 1553-0639; 1553-0639
• DOI: 10.1353/hir.2006.0019

Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004 Hay un punto del que la argumentación de Anna Brickhouse parte en su excelente libro Transamerican Literary Relations and the Nineteenth-Century Public Sphere. Brickhouse hará un trazado de las genealogías hemisféricas pues ". . . the formation of the American Renaissance that continues to organize so many literary-historiographical narratives of the nineteenth-century United States, whether through reinscription or multiculturalist revision, might more accurately be reconfigured as a transamerican renaissance, a period of literary border crossing, intercontinental exchange, and complex political implications whose unfamiliar genealogies we are just beginning to discern" (8). Esas narrativas estarían tramadas por los intercambios hemisféricos y los detallados recorridos por las publicaciones de esos años confirman sus argumentes: "The years leading up to the Congress of Panama witnessed the emergence of the first internationally recognized authors from the United States as well as an initial burgeoning of hemispheric thought within the national imagination" (2). El libro comienza con los planteos acerca de una literatura nacional recogidos en la North American Review que Brickhouse describe así: "urbane authors and editors fluent in numerous languages publish in only one; indigenous traditions lovingly admired for their "rich" originality furnish no more than occasions for nostalgia; and the slaveholding economies that undergird the public sphere of cultural productions are reduced to the level of metaphor" (17).