Chapter 16 - Unoriginality

Summary

This essay examines the importance of unoriginality in nineteenth-century American literature, showing how imitation and conventionality affirmed writers’ respectability and provided important legitimizing credentials. By way of illustration, this essay considers the career of Washington Irving, who presented himself as a guardian of literary tradition and repeatedly narrated the virtues of allowing the past to shape the future. As Irving’s career evidences, nineteenth-century readers did not particularly prize originality but instead found value in the familiar and conventional.