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Literary Research/Recherche littéraire 20.39-40 (2003): 341-344 Barbara Buchenau, Der frühe amerikanische historische Roman im transatlantischen Vergleich. Frankfurt: Lang, 2002; 473 pp.; ISBN: 3631389388 (pbk.); LC call no.: PS374.H5 B82; $68.95 As the method of adapting post-colonial theories for the research of historical phenomena is becoming widely accepted, many fields of research benefit from new impulses. Using concepts developed in conjunction with contemporary post-colonial studies to try and understand how the American cultural identity was being defined by the literature of the early 1800s is by no means far fetched. Barbara Buchenau is doing exactly this when she calls into question the importance of British writer, Sir Walter Scott, for the genesis of American culture. At the center of Barbara Buchenau's lengthy analysis stands the question of how much importance the early historical novel had for the shaping of an American national identity. In her introductory chapter, she explains Sir Walter Scott's importance for his American peers. He was the first writer to employ the history of Anglo-Scottish conflict in a way that stressed the differences between both parties, qualifying them as equally important peoples and cultures. This method of using historical events to distinguish national traits, and thereby describing the peculiarities of the portrayed cultures, was recognized by American writers such as Cooper as a possibility to create texts that were specimens of and programs for a genuinely American culture. There is, of course, another important aspect in which Scott influenced American writers, namely his popularity with critics and audiences around the world, which made him the most frequently imitated novelist of his time in terms of style and genre. In other words, he was not only followed by American writers of his time for his book's potential for cultural discernment, but as much for the simpler reason that readers were eager for texts written after his model. Barabara Buchenau's goal is to show how much authors like Sedgwick, Child and Cooper must have studied the writings of Scott's to assimilate his technique of using history for nationalist purposes. [end page 341] In order to emphasize the impact of Scott's writing on American authors as well as the difficulties that arose when he was merely imitated, Buchenau does not limit her scope to books she finds successful in this respect. She chooses four American texts as primary examples, starting out with one she considers a failure: In Samuel Woodworth's The Champions of Freedom, she points out the problems and dangers arising from the appropriation of Scott's methods. She then uses the resulting awareness to these problems in the analyses of the other novels, Catharine Maria Sedgwick's Hope Leslie, Lydia Maria Child's Hobomok, and James Fenimore Cooper's The Wept of Wish-Ton-Wish. Buchenau's theoretical framework draws on several recognized concepts of intertextuality, but her mainstay is writer response criticism, an approach introduced by renowned German scholar Armin Paul Frank. She explains in how far this approach is fundamentally different from comparatist theories in the tradition of Dyserinck: she sees her topic as belonging strictly to the domain of "American Literature," and she only wants to borrow some techniques of Comparative Literature to analyze the step-by-step process of American liberation from Britain manifest in the texts under scrutiny. She explains that writer response criticism is not interested in the indication of influence but "...auf die rezeptiven und transformativen Prozessen [sic] konzentriert, die in dem bezugnehmenden Text Niederschlag finden" (39). Unfortunately, the actual method by which an analysis of the receptive and transformational processes found in the scrutinized text can be accomplished, is not being described. The author fails also to clarify how the conscious avoidance of possible or probable relations to other texts can be proven (45), and opts instead to give an account of aims and possible applications of writer response criticism. This is the central weakness of Buchenau's study: instead of detailing her approach, she only sketches it very roughly and refers to texts by Frank. Her following analysis is well written, lucid and compelling, yet the reader may doubt her claim of using a new and revolutionary approach. In the end, it matters little if her methods are actually that different from those of others, because she succeeds in pointing out the open and hidden distinctions between Britain and America in the scrutinized texts, especially with regard to nationality and patriotism. After concluding her theoretical chapter with a short, yet well-structured overview of available literature on the subject, Buchenau details the ambivalent situation of the American literary market in the early 19th century. At that time, the American public had a great demand for literature that could not be satisfied due to underdeveloped distribution infrastructure. European and especially British authors were being preferred to Americans by audience and critics alike, mainly because the [end page 342] national artists were faced with a conundrum. They were expected to form a national literary avant-garde worthy of international recognition, while the only books that were deemed acceptable had to dwell on easily digestible topics, bring moral improvement, bear a positive message and were supposed to be enjoyable to every reader. Buchenau shows how this situation evolved, especially by analyzing contemporary reviews and critical treatises, and convincingly argues that following Scott's example must have been the only possibility for writers eager to promote nationalist ideas and patriotism. Buchenau starts the analytical part of her book with a discussion of Woodworth's The Champions of Freedom, who had set out to write a "history" featuring "a few fictitious scenes" (120). To him this meant producing a highly didactic text, which was to instruct on moral and nationalist topics. Buchenau shows his strategies of working patriotism into a novel that bears considerable traits of the gothic, and she arrives at the conclusion that all the constituting elements of later American historical novels can be found in his text. In elaborating the shortcomings of Woodworth's text, Buchenau convincingly establishes it as a novel that imitates Scott's writings because its author was not able to understand and assimilate Scott's texts. With the ambitious failure of The Champions of Freedom as one point of reference and Cooper's The Spy — the first and essential American historical novel — as another, Buchenau details the different methods of appropriation of Scott's model in the texts of Sedgwick, Child and Cooper. She analyzes the treatment of history, the frontier and the relationships of the main characters to outline two common traits: Neither of the three texts is meant to be a lesson in patriotism (like Woodworth's The Champions of Freedom), yet all of them convey strong and distinctly patriotic ideas about nationality as a part of their stories. This is achieved by the emphasis laid upon the description of families on the frontier, which is pointing to a political level in many ways. The other common factor of all texts is the treatment of the "noble savage" as forming a link between the native culture and that of the settlers — a concept already present in Scott's Rob Roy. The possibility of a peaceful co-existence (or even integration) of both parties is always presented, yet negated for the time being. Buchenau's analysis shows the great variety between those thematically similar novels, and she delineates in great detail and with much care the different historical concepts or the different ideas of historical spaces. Among the many other aspects of interest for Buchenau are the divergent, yet always critical positions towards the founding myths of American history and the prominent role given to women in the shaping of culture in all three novels. [end page 343] As a whole, Barbara Buchenau's analysis may be criticized for its theoretical vagueness, yet it remains a very impressive scrutiny of the American historical novel, that convincingly argues for a direct connection between the writings of Sir Walter Scott and those of Sedgwick, Child and Cooper. She absolutely proves her point that American writers of the early 19th century employed the genre of the historical novel to elaborate ideas about the future, especially to give glimpses of the possibility of a tolerant society with a more flexible structure in which women had defined their role.
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