Imagining America

Abstract

While Romantic criticism long has regarded Britain’s relation to France as crucial to the development of Romantic literature, it has paid less attention to the complex relation that the writers and the writing had to North America.¹ Those who have considered the relationship often have represented it as distant and tenuous. Paul Giles, for instance, suggests that

the New World manifested itself within the consciousness of British writers at the turn of the nineteenth century more as an abstract conception than a material place. … British writers projected an image of America as an externalization of their own ideologies of emancipation, a utopian image of alterity and virtual fulfillment.²

While Giles names a large part of the British relationship with America accurately, he understates the degree to which British writers investigated the empirical details of America and to which their figurations of the place accorded with contemporary European conceptions of its material reality. The writers perceived in the physical, material reality of America a preferable alternative space to which one might emigrate, and this idea contributed importantly to their dispositions, whether in the Americas or still in Britain.

SEDUCED by these sublime enchanting scenes of primitive nature, and these visions of terrestrial happiness, I had roamed far.

—William Bartram Travels

In the vast & unexplored regions of fairyland, there is ground enough & uncultivated; search there, & realize your favorite Susquehan[n]a scheme.

—Charles Lamb Letters

[T]he humanity of the Unite[d] States can never reach the sublime.

—John Keats Letters