Literature, American Style: The Originality of Imitation in the Early RepublicBetween 1780 and 1800, authors of imaginative literature in the new United States wanted to assert that their works, which bore obvious connections to anglophone literature on the far side of the Atlantic, nevertheless constituted a properly American tradition. No one had yet figured out, however, what it would mean to write like an American, what literature with an American origin would look like, nor what literary characteristics the elusive quality