Reclaiming Voices beyond America's Borders: Crèvecoeur's Voyage speaks from across the Atlantic

This paper takes Hector St John de Crèvecoeur's Voyage dans le Haute Pensylvanie et dans l'ètat de New York (1801) as a case study depicting how the lack of openness to multilingualism and translation have impoverished American literature. Published in French during the author's lifetime, only in the second half of the 21st century was the linguistic “repatriation” into English accomplished. Voyage, despite being a testament to America's national development, suffered a complete lack of recognition due to the fact it was published in France. Despite the work is entirely dedicated to philosophical reflections concerning the geography, ethnography and socio-utopianism of the new nation, its linguistic “otherness”, coupled with a significant lack of translations into English, have condemned the work to America's indifference. By tracing Voyage's textual history and critical marginalisation from American publishing markets (Lawrence Venuti), this paper argues that American literature has two qualities that have long gone unrecognised: its transatlanticism and multilinguism (Bourdieu and Casanova). Voyage is an example of both: written abroad and in a language that was not English, it suffered cultural oblivion. I claim instead that works that fall outside of America's national and linguistic borders are works that deserve to be addressed as pioneers of the cultural and linguistic frontier beyond the Anglo-American world.