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The Columbia History of the American NovelThe men, on the other hand, sold modestly or poorly in their lifetimes and felt estranged from the market, yet they forged an individualized conception of literature as "high" art, as a separate realm analogous to the newly theorized category of the economic. Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper, fiction writers who came of age in the 1820s, prefigured the allegiances and contradictions of their canonical successors. Of the important male artists active in the mid-nineteenth century, only these two were born in the previous century and attained adulthood before the War of 1812. Performing a complex dance of equivocation, they advanced into the commercialized future while preserving essential characteristics from the preprofessional, foreign-dominated past. The two men were regarded in their own time as imitators of British models: Cooper as the American Scott, Irving as the American Lamb. Irving's international -57- hit, The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. (1819-20), is suffused with Anglophilia and announces its superiority to the market in its title ...» |
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