Locations of Literary Nationalism

The Whitmanian moment combines post-Kantian claims to privileged sensibility with expressivist models of nation- and selfhood that emerged between the 1750s and 1800. The question of cultural selfreliance preoccupied American intellectuals well before the so-called period of ‘literary nationalism’. Yet nationalist poetics have little use for Whitmanian cultural parallelism before 1800. Eighteenth-century American intellectuals, steeped in theological regionalism and socio-religious variants of the translatio imperii idea (Ellis 2002; Freese 1996), are confident that the political and economic advantages of the newly-won independence will entail a flowering of the arts and letters and transform the United States into a cultural center. But they expect the artifacts produced by a future ‘American Athens’ (see McCarthy 1985) to carry universal rather than specifically American signatures. The natural, political, and economic advantages of the US are seen as determining artistic discourses only in a pragmatic sense, inasmuch as they provide superior material conditions and institutional frameworks for a thriving ‘republic’ of arts and letters. As society is not yet understood in terms of an exteriority/interiority opposition, the material and moral conditions of Liberty and Virgin Land are not believed to produce a symptomatic aesthetics. The neoclassical image of the nation as a machine (rather than an organism) implies that once America's cultural economic and political engines are up and running, artistic practice will follow universal laws independent of social and temporal contingencies.