Too isolated, too insular: American Literature and the World

• Main Author: Matthew Wilkens
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at McGill University 2021-06-01
• Series: Journal of Cultural Analytics
• Online Access: https://culturalanalytics.scholasticahq.com/article/25273-too-isolated-too-insular-american-literature-and-the-world.pdf

Are American authors homers? Do they devote too much of their attention to American concerns and settings? Is American literature as a whole different from other national literatures in its degree of self-interest? We attempt to answer these questions, and to address related issues of national literary identity, by examining the distribution of geo-graphic usage in more than 100,000 volumes of American, British, and other English-language fiction published between 1850 and 2009. We offer four principal findings: American literature consistently features greater domestic attention than does British literature; American literature is, nevertheless, significantly concerned with global loca-tions; politics and other international conflicts are meaningful drivers of changing literary attention in American and British fiction alike; and prize-nominated books are the only examined subclass of American fiction that has become significantly more international in the decades after World War II, a fact that may account for readers’ unfounded percep-tion of a similar overall shift in American literature.