Ezra Tawil's Literature, American Style incisively outlines the history of debates over early Anglo-American literature, wherein critics from D. H. Lawrence to Elisa Tamarkin have contested whether it is original or derivative, Anglophobic or Anglophilic, cosmopolitan or nationalist. In response, Tawil offers a compelling argument: that early American writers defined this style as imitative and original, national and transnational. These writers asserted that American land fostered a distinctive style by revisiting earlier literary debates to invoke a “negative affiliation” (11); defining their work against familiar British modes, such as a high style, they nevertheless deployed competing British aesthetics and genres. Indeed, Tawil theorizes that Americans’ focus on developing a “‘style’ always points to a locus of difference in repetition: one exhibits a style when one participates in a common practice but does so in a particular manner” (21). His book locates early American style in unexpected and familiar work by white writers: Noah Webster's linguistic theories, J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur's French vision of American letters, Susanna Rowson's transatlantic novel, and Charles Brocken Brown's and Hannah Foster's rewriting of British Gothic and seduction novels. Together, they defined Anglo American style as evincing authentic feeling through a rough-and-humble form, rooted in an American landscape and a return to Anglo-Saxon linguistic roots.

As Tawil highlights, the opening chapter on Webster's efforts to standardize spelling may seem an odd fit for a book on literary style. Yet this section works in tandem with the second chapter to theorize that linguists like Webster and writers like Crèvecoeur both deployed a “modal solution to the problem of foreign debt: in the realm of linguistics, a new mode of spelling” and “in the realm of literary production, a new ‘style’ of English literature” (86). They drew on style to “turn a population into a people” (47). For Webster, this meant challenging Samuel Johnson by calling for ostensibly simple spellings based on etymological origins in hopes of spreading English to America's diverse linguistic communities. Crèvecoeur developed American identity through the use of a “middle style” and the humility topos, defining the American farmer's voice against that of his more refined British addressee. While neither style was original, Webster and Crèvecoeur invoked the concept of autochthony to suggest that these transplanted modes could become distinct within the American setting.

Chapters 3 and 4 continue to trace how writers drew on this botanical metaphor of autochthony, while crafting a distinctive American style in the popular genres of Gothic and seduction novels. Tawil locates Charles Brockden Brown's aesthetic influences in Edmund Burke's assertions that a “rough” style could evoke the sublime, and notes that Brown reworks familiar Gothic tropes by locating them in a disorienting American landscape. Brown's portrait of a Gothic America presents a kind of “aesthetic fallacy”: he asserts that the land produces this artistic style and the “romantic” emotions it elicits (134). Whereas Brown's “rough” style risked being dismissed as overwrought prose, Tawil contends, seduction novels relied on a plain style. As a scholar of nineteenth-century literature, I find this contribution illuminating; Tawil posits that gender politics prevented earlier recognition that this popular genre helped associate American literature with “simplicity of style, authenticity of expression, and homespun virtue” (150). He thereby shifts our attention to elements of the genre that we miss if we focus only on critiques of sentimentalism's insincerity.

Reading Tawil's book a few years after its publication renders all the more apparent not only his fresh take on how early American writers define their style, but also his contribution to current conversations on how to analyze American style without reinscribing US exceptionalism, as in Carrie Tirado Bramen's American Niceness (2017), and on imitation's role in American literature, as in Alexandra Socarides's In Plain Sight (2020). Literature, American Style's compelling theory of early American aesthetics, in turn, leaves me wanting to know more about the choice to focus on white writers. Tawil observes that American and European writers often deployed Native American cultures as evidence that the land fostered expressions of genuine feeling, but “seldom gave examples of Native American poetry, narrative, or myth” (116). What might this reading of early American style look like in conversation with deeper citations of Native literatures? Relatedly, Tawil observes that Anglo-American writers did not “embrace African American literary forms like the slave narrative as the (arguably far stronger) basis of a culturally distinct tradition” (10). How might we read early Anglo-American writers in relation to black contemporaries, such as Phillis Wheatley, whose work offers obvious examples of literature critiqued as too imitative (in an era of imitation). Is the supposition that there were different stakes when writers of color deployed a middle style or claimed Americanness? Who could and can invoke devices such as the humility topos to gain recognition as an artist crafting American style?