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The American literary space of the late 19th century might be said to be a fighting arena between two forces on issues whether to denounce or accept the past European cultural tradition. The patriotic side would suspect it as a colonial dust of the Old World to be and propose to rebuild the national personality and culture based on unique national experience in the New World. The European, or cosmopolitan side persuaded the nation to consider itself as a part of Europe. They wanted to accept critically the European culture as a reference to American culture.
Ralph Waldo Emerson's poetry and philosophical essays, Nathaniel Hawthorne's romance-novels, and Walt Whitman's poetry were full of romantically democratic spirits. Their works were signs of American cultural independence. By his novel A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court and his travel writings such as The Innocents Abroad and Following the Equator, Mark Twain became the American icon to represent this trend of anti-European patriotism in the 19th century America. On the other side, there were Charles Eliot Norton, Edwin L. Godkin, James T. Fields who were cosmopolitan scholars and journalists. They regarded Henry James as a writer to represent their interests. James seems to be, in many respects, set opposite to Twain; James seems to be, in many respects, set opposite to Twain; for example, their different literary styles, cultural biases, and political attitudes. But their literary and critical works served to attack and reconsider the European culture both directly and indirectly.
Leela Gandhi thinks of two kinds of postcolonial strategies to cave in the center of imperial(ism), One is to refuse and destroy the past legacy and to set up a new national culture in the postcolonial areas. The other is to mimic and appropriate the imperial language and text and expose the instable authority of the center. This is the 'in-betweenness' of the postcolonial literature. Emerson, Hawthorne, Whitman, and Twain seem to be the patriotic one; New England cosmopolitans and Henry James, the other. James's novels, from the earlier work Roderick Hudson and An International Episode through The Portrait of a Lady to The Golden Bowl, have a virtue to be regarded as postcolonial. His American characters mimic and appropriate the language and behavior of the European counterparts, by which they expose the instable authority of the center, that is, the value of the Old World. The American characters, however, are 'in-between'; they are neither European nor American, neither patriotic nor pro-imperial, neither central nor marginal. Rather, they run around between the two conflicting areas of Europe and America, old and new, and imperial and colonial. They are, in the Bakhtinian sense, the dialogical subjects, not monological.