In this ambitious study of the intense and often adversarial relationship between English and American literature in the nineteenth century, Robert Weisbuch portrays the rise of American literary nationalism as a self-conscious effort to resist and, finally, to transcend the contemporary British influence.
Describing the transatlantic "double-cross" of literary influence, Weisbuch documents both the American desire to createa literature distinctly different from English models and the English insistence that any such attempt could only fail. The American response, as he demonstrates, was...