For some time, scholars have acknowledged the importance of British literature to the development of American literary culture. Less attention has been paid to the circulation of American literature in England. Joseph Rezek's London and the Making of Provincial Literature addresses this gap in scholarship by charting the reciprocal, if uneven, transatlantic circulation of texts between 1800 and 1850 that was dominated by the “centripetal pull” of London (2). He argues that American, Scots, and Irish writers navigated this trade by developing a shared “provincial literary formation” (2). Works by James Fenimore Cooper, Washington Irving, Walter Scott, Maria Edgeworth, and Sydney Owenson all guide English readers through unfamiliar landscapes, claim authoritative and exclusive local knowledge, and situate literary exchange as a realm for a desired cross-cultural communion. Though the London trade marketed their novels as distinctly national literatures, Rezek argues that the shared strategies of these writers stemmed from their common provincial position. This study, therefore, locates national literatures, but also literature more broadly, as phenomena of Atlantic modernity, that must be understood in the context of transatlantic circulation rather than at the level of the nation itself.

Rezek pursues this argument by interweaving publishing history and close literary readings. Chapter 1 documents the effects of the power and prestige of London on the transatlantic book trade in the first half of the century, while chapter 2 explores how the complexities of this trade shaped Matthew Carey's attempts to publish Scott in Philadelphia, and were fictionalized in Scott's Tales of My Landlord (1831), which employs transatlantic reprinting to perform authorial humility. Chapter 3 suggests that novels by Edgeworth and Owenson quiet the turbulent political relations between England and Ireland, but do so in order to imagine the literary as a unique realm for cross-cultural intimacy, rather than to fulfil a Unionist politics. Chapters 4 and 5, on “transatlantic revision,” will be of most interest to scholars of American literature. The first finds the roots of Irving's 1820 revisions to The Sketch Book in his editing of The Analectic Magazine. Reprinting English texts alongside American ones led Irving to value an Anglo-American sphere of literary production that could be both universal and national, and which he seeks to re-create in The Sketch Book. Chapter 5 investigates how Scott and Cooper used parallel provincial strategies to create fantasies of a cross-cultural autonomous literary realm that is distanced from nationalist politics. Particularly striking is Rezek's reading of Cooper's revisions to The Pioneers for its 1832 London edition, which amplified the Anglo-American communion of the novel's marriage plot, and transformed Natty Bumppo from a figure of national identification into one whom English audiences could aestheticize from a distance. Chapter 6 suggests that the subordinate position of provincial actors could also generate “defensiveness, rage, envy, and pride” – an interconnected Scots, Irish, and American antagonism towards England that Rezek traces in marginalia, periodicals, ephemera, and song (149). The Epilogue finds evidence for the decline of London in Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter (1851), in which Hawthorne bypasses the contemporary London market as a site of authority.

The Epilogue unfortunately lacks the interpolation of book history and literary reading that is a strength elsewhere. Hawthorne may have thought London “unimportant” but his American publishers assiduously, if unsuccessfully, sought an authorized London publisher for The Scarlet Letter (197). Exploring tensions between their actions and Hawthorne's authorial pose would have avoided the 1850 cutoff seeming too neat. Furthermore, while Rezek is open about addressing a relatively small set of literary actors, this decision means that Cooper and Irving – both of whom were relatively exceptional in negotiating lasting arrangements with London houses – stand as representative for American authorship. The useful appendix of American novels published in London before 1830 invites us to question whether provincial aesthetics can be found in novels by Catharine Maria Sedgwick and Lydia Maria Child, whose transatlantic plots get a single paragraph between them, and if American authors without authorized London publishers also tailored novels to that market.

Nevertheless, Rezek's argument that the uneven transatlantic trade shaped early American authorship and literary aesthetics is persuasive, and he clearly shows the importance of American literature to the English trade long before the success of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin in 1852. Rezek illustrates that material, as well as imaginative, exchanges created transatlantic discourses between Ireland, Scotland, and America that were routed around, as well as through, London. Through its innovative close readings and its broader argument, London and the Making of Provincial Literature makes an eloquent case that circulation, rather than the nation, should be the organizing principle for literary criticism and book history.