William Huntting Howell
2006-2008 Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow
whh@sas.upenn.edu
“Imitation, Emulation and Early American Culture”
My book manuscript analyzes the various arts of competitive duplication that gave structure to the philosophical, literary, and political worlds of the Founding. Revising Romantic and exceptionalist accounts of the first years of the United States—narratives that continue to build on Crèvecoeur’s exultation in “the new man, this American” and that renew Emerson’s equation of “self-reliance” and virtuous nationalism—I develop a theory and a history of American un-exceptionalism. Reading works by Benjamin Franklin, David Rittenhouse, Benjamin Rush, Susanna Rowson, Thomas Jefferson, Phillis Wheatley, Benjamin Banneker and Charles Brockden Brown alongside scientific instruments, embroidered samplers, pedagogical treatises, letters, orations, and coins, I show how the identification and reproduction of examples was at once crucial to molding individual subjectivity, imagining literary art, and consolidating the early nation-state.