Academic Paper (excerpt)

     Alongside this anxiety and desire on the part of the Americans to emulate the British was a yearning to break free from such ties, “analyze and resist continuing colonial attitudes” (Walder 6), and in the process assert an American nationality.  Perhaps this yearning, although it existed side by side with anxiety, can be seen as the beginning of the shift to a more confident attitude towards America’s own literary production. 

     Robert Weisbuch discusses the breaking free of America from British influence.  He claims that “making [American literature] new will mean making it real; and the real will be defined more in opposition than in fidelity to the status quo of everyday existence” (23).  This could be the root of American individualism: declaring unfit the British influences that came before it.  It is interesting to note that “American writers of this period not only had to confront the single situation of British literary dominance but  …they often shared formulae for confronting it” (Weisbuch 24).  In other words, they were forming a community; through the unity inherent in a community of writers, they could more easily resist British influences and find worth and value in their own literary arena. 

     “The literary battle against the British is persistent and its indirect effects are far-flung.  …We have here a tale of the nineteenth century, …and this angst toward the British persists long after the amazing American creativity of the two decades before the Civil War” (Weisbuch 31).  Perhaps this angst of which Weisbuch speaks is the very seed of rebellion; perhaps it is this that gave the American literary community the momentum to break away from the Old World and begin to develop a literary tradition of its own.