Common Place: Rereading 'Nation' in the Quoting Age, 1776-1860

325 Pages·2014·1.52 MB·English

Common Place: Rereading ‘Nation’ in the Quoting Age, 1776-1860

Anitta C. Santiago

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the
requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY
2014
© 2014
Anitta C. Santiago
All rights reserved
ABSTRACT

Common Place: Rereading ‘Nation’ in the Quoting Age, 1776-1860
Anitta C. Santiago

This dissertation examines quotation specifically, and intertextuality more generally, in
the development of American/literary culture from the birth of the republic through the Civil
War. This period, already known for its preoccupation with national unification and the
development of a self-reliant national literature, was also a period of quotation, reprinting and
copying. Within the analogy of literature and nation characterizing the rhetoric of the period, I
translate the transtextual figure of quotation as a protean form that sheds a critical light on the
nationalist project. This project follows both how texts move (transnational migration) and how
they settle into place (national naturalization). Combining a theoretical mapping of how texts
move and transform intertextually and a book historical mapping of how texts move and
transform materially, I trace nineteenth century examples of the culture of quotation and how its
literary mutability both disrupts and participates in the period’s national and literary movements.
In the first chapter, I engage scholarship on republican print culture and on republican
emulation to interrogate the literary roots of American nationalism in its transatlantic context.
Looking at commonplace books, autobiographies, morality tales, and histories, I examine how
quotation as a practice of memory impression functions in national re-membering. In the second
chapter, I follow quotation in early nineteenth-century national and literary contests of space and
fashioning, the movement for international copyright in the culture of reprinting and the calls for
a national literature. The third chapter considers questions of appropriation, assimilation, and
translation in hemispheric poetic interactions within the context of the annexation and Manifest
Destiny. The last chapter examines quotation in the antebellum period where, in the absence of a
unifying authority, the fragments of quotation offer a way to tell the story of the nation.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
1. Acknowledgments………………………………………………………………………iii
2. Dedication………………………………………………………………………………..v
3. Introduction……………..……………………………………………………………….1
4. Chapter 1- Deep Impressions: Re-membering (Com)Patriots
Framing Contests: Quotation in America, America in Quotation………...……………..11
Memory-Building: Commonplace Books and the Order of Fragments………..………..20
Fit Impressions: Genre and the Impression of Memory and Morals…………...………..34
Discipline and Publish: National Confederation, Ambivalence Bound………….……...51
Re-membering Nathan Hale: Contesting Last Words…………….……………………..62
5. Chapter 2- Make Way: Fashionable Entrée, American Space, and the Mutability of
Naturalization
From Rags to Riches, Riches to Rags: Irvings’ Literary Ecology………………………78
Characters in Costume: Anglo-America and the Fashionable Nation………..…………95
The Dandies Are Out: Dandiacal Traditions and National and Universal Pageant...103
Reforming the Dandy: Contests of Literary and National Character....……….………113
The Dandy in American Character…………………………………………………..……..124
Fashioning Nature: The Art of the Preserve and Righting Plots……………………….136
Game Laws and Property Rights: Naturalizing Preservation……………..……………142
Engendering a Neutral Ground: The Nature of Representation…………..…………...151
Memorial Epigraphs: Hope Leslie and Resurrecting Plots…….………………………….160

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6. Chapter 3- Manifest Translating: Assimilating Power in the Hemisphere and
Parallel Encounters
Passable Verses: The Homeric Questioning of American Originality and Influence.…170
Parallel Passages: Tracing Imitations and Literary Exposé…………………………….177
Stealing from the Spanish: Bryant, Mexico, and Cuba……………...………………….191
Traductor a Traductor: Bryant and Heredia, A Case Study…………………………….207
Longfellow’s Inverted Tree, Known By Its Hemispheric Fruit………………………...216
Rainy Day Men: Longfellow and Quintero, A Case Study…………………………….240
7. Chapter 4- Antiquarian Modernities: The Fragments of a Tradition
Floating Fragments: Emerson and the Sources of Transcendental Originality
Broken Vessels and Dismembered Deities: Quotation as Emersonian Originality…..249
An Other Problem: The National Failure of Quotation………………………………….257
Editing Cultures: The Quotation Books of Sarah Josepha Hale and John Bartlett……264
Sarah Hale’s American Presence and Erasure…………………………………………...265
John Bartlett: A(n) (Un)familiar Authority………………………......……………………273
Give It Up, Sub-Subs!: A Final Word on Decomposition and Recomposition………...289
8. Epilogue…………………………...…………………………………………………...294
9. Bibliography……………...……………………………………………………………300

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
What nineteenth-century readers knew well was that all texts contain multiple influential
presences, and I am pleased to say that this dissertation is no different. I am privileged to have
had the most supportive, patient, and insightful dissertation committee imaginable. I thank my
advisor Ross Posnock for being an encyclopedia of academic research, directing me to the
scholarship that has most impacted my thinking, for his careful and generous reading and
commenting on my drafts, and for his incredible patience, understanding, and never failing
encouragement. I thank Sharon Marcus for making me a better writer (I still have much to learn
from her), for her perspicacity in seeing my project more clearly than I did, for her always spot-
on advice both on my scholarship and professional development, and for going out of her way to
support me. I thank Lisa Gordis who has been instrumental in my formation as a scholar and a
person, who first taught me to love early American literature, without whose encouragement I
would not have even dreamed of graduate school, and whose confidence in my ideas slowly but
surely helped me to develop my own.
My heartfelt thanks go to Meredith McGill, whose scholarship has been so influential for
this dissertation in particular and my thinking more generally, for her generous feedback with
which to continue to develop this project as well as to T. Austin Graham for opening my eyes to
more terrain for historical inquiry in this project.
I thank Ezra Tawil, Jenny Davidson, the rest of the Eighteenth-Century Reading Group,
with whom I was able to discuss the beginnings of this project, for their helpful advice and
questions. I would also like to thank Gerald Cloud who helped me with my research on John
Bartlett and the American publication history of silver-fork novels, as well as William Delgado
at the Hispanic Society of America for his help with the Revista de la Habana.
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I thank all the professors I have had the honor to learn from here for being models of
outstanding scholarship and teaching for emulation: Amanda Claybaugh, Julie Crawford,
Michael Golston, Wen Jin, Shayne Legassie, Edward Mendelson, Julie Peters, Victoria Rosner,
Clifford Siskin, Maura Spiegel, Gauri Viswanathan, and Nicole Wallack.
Thank you to all the scholars whose work I have quoted or referenced in this dissertation.
Many thanks, too, to all my fellow graduate students in the department who have
recommended books, commiserated and advised. I thank my classmates in Professor Marcus’s
article workshop for helping me to sort out my Bartlett research, and in particular, Olivia Moy
and Jangwook Huh for their help and friendship. I am incredibly grateful and indebted to the
consultants at the Writing Center, especially Katie McIntyre, without whom I might never have
been able to pull off the final draft.
Last, but by no means least, I thank my friends and family. Thanks to my friends from
Coliseum Books, especially Mike Lindgren, Ron Kolm, and Conrad Brenner, for discussions on
my dissertation texts at Muldoon’s and the Cloister Café. To Jennifer Ren for being a sounding
board and helping me with French and German. To Father Martin Curtin and William and Mary
Curtin for their spiritual and intellectual support. Thanks to everyone in the family who asked
“how’s it going?” and showered me with prayers and love, especially my aunt Maria, my uncle
Wilfredo, my cousin Michele, my Ramoses and “Uncle Victor.” To my little cousins Michael
and Uriah and baby nephew Jayden for being a constant source of joy. I thank my brother Alan
for allowing me to vent when I needed to and for always having ready words of wisdom or wit to
keep me going, as well as my sister-in-law Tameka for her support. Most of all, I thank my mom,
for ponche de café, for learning about dandies and listening to so many of my think-alouds, for
those quotations that inspired me each day, and for being just about everything for me.
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DEDICATION

To my grandmother Emilia Ramos Aguilar de Rivas who taught me the mainest lessons.

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INTRODUCTION

In John Steinbeck’s The Winter of Our Discontent, thirteen year-old Ellen asks her father
Ethan Allen Hawley a question about “copying from books” as she and her brother write their
essays for the National I Love America Contest. After instructing his daughter on the use of
quotations, Ethan considers, “I guess half the writing in America is quotations, if it isn’t
anthologies.”1 The winner of the contest is Ethan’s son Allen, whose essay turns out to be a
plagiarism, composed from his father’s anthologies of the great American speeches by Henry
Clay, Daniel Webster, Thomas Jefferson, and Abraham Lincoln. “I don’t know why we didn’t
catch it, but we didn’t,”2 says Dunscombe, a representative from the television branch come to
break the news. He shows Ethan the essay and asks, “Do you recognize it?”3 Ethan does not but
admits, “It sounds familiar—sounds like maybe somewhere in the last century.”
This contest of nationalist writing does reveal something vaguely familiar about “the last
century,” about the history of the nation that we have perhaps failed to recognize. Though
nationalist originality has characterized the conventional view of the nineteenth century,
Steinbeck’s Ethan points us to that other half of the tradition of American writing, composed of
quotations and anthologies, the copying from books. Indeed, quotation was the vogue of the
period, “the quoting age.”4 Its reading public was educated in the eighteenth-century culture of

1 John Steinbeck, The Winter of Our Discontent (1961, New York: Penguin Books, 1983), 168.

2 Steinbeck, 305.

3 Ibid., 306.

4 Across the Atlantic, Isabella Rushton Preston compiler of A Handbook of Familiar Quotations declared to her
publisher on presenting her plan, “This is a quoting age—the newspapers, Reviews && teem with them.” This was
as true of America as it was of England, for Preston’s book would be the basis of first edition of Bartlett’s Familiar
Quotations. See Michael Hancher, “Familiar Quotations,” Harvard Library Bulletin 14.2 (2003): 32.

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emulation, kept commonplace books, played quotation games as a pastime, debated quotations in
periodicals, and enjoyed identifying imitations in the literature they read.
This dissertation attempts to tell a story of that half-tradition in American literature
comprised of quotations. It reads this tradition alongside the period’s burgeoning rhetoric of
nationalist self-reliance, to interrogate the relationship between national and literary culture
supposed by “national literature” and the conditions of possibility for the cultural development of
the nation. It is telling that Steinbeck reveals this half-forgotten history within a national contest.
These two cultures, the culture of quotation and that of nationalist originality, which ran
alongside each other in the long nineteenth-century, did indeed run in contest. Quotation in my
study serves to challenge the univocal tradition of nationalist originality, but, inherently
ambivalent, quotation also negotiates with and participates with this tradition.
Contest and ambivalence emerge in this study as the constants of the culture of
quotation’s variable development. Contest is the nature of quotation, and it is a national one
because the national “we” is always in quotation marks, scare quotes, or, in George L. Dillon’s
borrowing from James Joyce, perverted commas.5 Dillon’s extensive discussion of “perverted
commas” in “My Words of An Other” identifies the contest that occurs in quotation marks as one
in which the stakes are absence or presence. Linking perverted commas to what Heidegger and
Derrida have called placing words “under erasure,” Dillon describes them as “usage under
erasure” where “Not-Self intrud[es] into the Self’s discourse, but also being made a part of it.”6
Here Dillon refers to the use of perverted commas over the words from which one desires to

5 George L. Dillon, “My Words of An Other,” College English 50, no.1 (1988). Dillon adapts Joyce’s term for
quotation marks generally, a play on inverted commas, to scare quotes specifically.

6 Dillon, 66. Marjorie Garber also links “scare quotes” to Heidegger/Derrida’s “under erasure”. See Marjorie
Garber, Quotation Marks. (New York: Routledge, 2003), 11. Willis Goth Regier, on the other hand, more
generically describes scare quotes as placing words “under suspicion” (emphasis mine). See Willis Goth Regier,
Quotology. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2010), 28.

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