Narratives of Resentment: Notes towards a Literary History of European Anti-Americanism

This essay investigates the history and internal functioning of a specifically literary form of anti-Americanism that for more than two hundred years has played a key role in the propagation of negative images of the United States. Drawing on Dickens's Martin Chuzzlewit (1843-44), Duhamel's Scénes de la vie future (1930), and Graham Greene's The Quiet American (1955), it analyzes three major narrative paradigms of anti-Americanism literature: the story of the disillusioned emigrant, anti-American futurology, and anti-American tribunalism. On this basis, the essay offers a discussion of fictional literature as a medium for the development and dissemination of anti-Americanism, before concluding by linking literary anti-Americanism to the quest for a common European identity.