The American translation (James Fenimore Cooper, Margaret Fuller, Walt Whitman)

Practices of translation were central to the conceptual development of Anglo-American literature and culture. Critical discussions have long represented American literature as defining itself in relation to language. By language, scholars have meant a unique vernacular that distinguished American from English literature. More recently, the vernacular has been reexamined as a form of “Creole” writing that incorporates different languages. Both approaches define national cultures as linguistically uniform and hostile to other cultures. Such accounts marginalize the differences that were integral to Antebellum culture. By considering translation, a largely overlooked yet pervasive American literary practice, this dissertation draws attention to a range of cooperative literary relations that authors developed as they encountered linguistic diversity at home and abroad.; The meanings and the practices that Anglo-American authors attached to translation were not uniform. As writers framed arguments about translation, they defined two distinct visions of “American” literature. One approach conceptualized American literature as a print commodity that created monolingual mass reading publics and laid the basis for national consciousness. Translations that resolved linguistic and cultural differences participated in this national literature. While such nationalist translations predominated after mid-century, the authors on whom this dissertation focuses practiced transnational translation to create world literature. They hoped to engage without incorporating what was “other”: rather than expressing a view by which language, literature and nation mutually defined one another, translation provided authors such as James Fenimore Cooper, Margaret Fuller and Walt Whitman with a means of realizing a public sphere ideology that extended beyond the nation state. For those writers who understood the public sphere in terms of a worldwide exchange of ideas, translation was an ideal public act because of its capacity to foster debate over issues that monolingual literature tends to foreclose. At a time of geographic and demographic expansion, thinking about “American” literature involved examining the United States' internal and external relations to the world.