Document Type
Contribution to Book
Publication Date
2022
Abstract
This essay examines the importance of unoriginality in nineteenth-century American literature, showing how imitation and conventionality affirmed writers’ respectability and provided important legitimizing credentials. By way of illustration, this essay considers the career of Washington Irving, who presented himself as a guardian of literary tradition and repeatedly narrated the virtues of allowing the past to shape the future. As Irving’s career evidences, nineteenth-century readers did not particularly prize originality but instead found value in the familiar and conventional.
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108566872.019
Publisher
Cambridge University Press
ISBN
9781108566872
Repository Citation
Stokes, C. (2022). Unoriginality. In J. S. Murison (Ed.), American Literature in Transition, 1820–1860 (pp. 269–284). chapter, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Publication Information
American Literature in Transition, 1820–1860