"National Literatures" in English: Toward a New Paradigm

IHE CONCEPT OF national literatures in English has outlived its usefulness and should be abandoned, both as a way of thinking about literary history and as a way of organizing curricula. Whatever evaluation one makes of them as political phenomena, the nationalisms that gave rise successively to the concept of a distinctly British literature, then an American literature, and now Australian, Canadian, and a host of what are often described equivocally as new literatures, constitute a barrier to clear thinking about what has long since become an international enterprise carried on in many cultural settings. As the medium that defines the horizon of intelligibility, language is a more principled and useful (though not absolute) basis than nationality for distinguishing one from another. To define English as literature in the English language, no matter where or by whom written rejoins conceptually what has been artificially fragmented, makes possible a genuine multiculturalism in English literary studies, entitles writers who are neither British nor American to more widespread attention, and helps us think more fruitfully about literary relations among authors, literary movements, societies, and periods. For nearly a hundred and fifty years a majority of the people who speak English as their native language have lived outside Europe. Not since the seventeenth century has English been only the of the British Isles. A powerful case can be made that during the twentieth century produced in Britain ceased to be the most important limb of what has often been called a tree of many branches, watered from a variety of sources. Cultural nationalists in former colonies have frequently objected to the tree metaphor, pointing out that a tree has only one trunk and arises from a single plot of ground. Let us therefore say that in English is now a thoroughly hybridized stock with roots in many soils. The idea that the literary world has a single center from which normative standards and