"What is an American Book?"

International audienceThe history of literature in the United States was for a long time the history of a quest for a “national” literature, culminating in the search for the Great American novel in the last quarter of the 19th century and the first decades of the 20th century. Yet for several decades now, literary historians and scholars, as well as book historians, have clearly revised the notion of “American literature”, in particular demonstrating how transatlantic US culture was in the 19th century. In my own field of research, since the turn of the 21st century, scholars in book history have taken a transnational and international turn, moving away from a focus on purely national book and publishing histories – Histoire de l’édition française, 4 volumes; A History of the Book in America, 5 volumes (2000-2010) –in keeping with the overall turn to international, transnational and connected history. This paper proposes to interrogate the notion of “national identity” in regard to US literature imported into France in the 20th century, from a transatlantic and partially material book history perspective. Building on the cultural sociology of Pierre Bourdieu (cf. Pascale Casanova) and on the sociology and history of translation (Gisèle Sapiro, Blaise Wilfert-Portal), I will examine some of the effects of the material conditions of this transatlantic passage, as well as the effects brought about by those who helped to import this literature and accommodate it to the French literary field in the 20th century