[typing up notes so i can throw out notebooks. ignore.]

1886, Richards: Assimilation: the dominant Saxon character wins out over indiv language loyalties, but “isolated inheritance, working freshly” “Saxon-Greek Renaissance in New World”

1900 Wendell: Relates AmLit to BrLit, as good as fatherland. So Am lit exists in Colonial relation to Br Lit. Ancestry British.
Using babel as precedent: cautions tt diversity in lang not race is divisive, becos “Language not race was the imprint of nationality”(wendell) races must be held together by common language, and that would be “this english of ours”

emphasis: as good as. Notion of “lag” again the idea of “Renaissance” in New England. NE and Elizabethan immigrants constituted linguistic and cultural Centre/mainstream, outside of this: = the rest of the story (title of last section of Wendell History)

(Ancestry impt: Whitman and NY: saw immigration as threat: the new and the modern is aligned with the multilingual, and tt’s bad.

? notice list of European cities doesn’t include english cities. There is foreign, and there is English.) see also Chacon’s intro to Calm after storm: neither Anglos nor Foreigners.

03 Higginson: again, underlines ancestry: even the most recent works have english ancestry.

03 Trent (Columbia) Ducks whole issue: paradigm: Cav and Puritans. Analysis not mindful of historical accuracy; subsumes all immigrants, before and after the predominace of English speakers.

17 – Roosevelt: “One nation..one language…”the language of the declaration of independence. “a national threatened by the Babel of immigration” (Cagidemetrio 17) xrefer wendell: language, not race, was the “imprint” of nationality

46 Spiller Every generation must produce at least one liteary history of the US, each gen must define past in own terms.
“US = race of races!” (Whitman) what is distinctive abt US lit is tt it’s “transported and tranformed” – English English ? American English

or else H.L. Mencken: US strain of English direct descent from Elizabethan times (19th C idea), still trace lineage thru Eng. We’re diff, and emphasises this difference!! But still in relation to england: we’re “more engl than engl!” as improvement on wendell’s as good as eng. (king of shadows)

Translatio imperii.

And, “ability to incorporate…. mixed idioms of frontier…” is precisely evidence of linguistic dynamism : creative translation of engl ? am.engl. is understood in turn as the lang tt emerged from the translation of other diff tongue: and hence melting pot.

And yet in same Spiller history: phenomenon of “cultural islands” Cagidemetrio: “tells not the rise of amer lit in analogy to am lang.”

Native American = 1 chapter, Mingling of tongues = 1 chapter (all non english works grouped together) Cagidemetrio: not even “this generation” becos dept on cambridge hist of ame lit. and tt was much more detailed) Unity of chapter divided according to lang of each work, each had own history, and makes no connection btn either engl lang lit or same lang lit. Also, omits relationship btn lit and us hist context. Cagidemetrio calls it linguistic separatism.

To fix it?

Comparative, multilingual examination of works pairing works of same period/interest despite diff lang? Need to go from recognising linguistic diversity to linguistically diverse literatures.