ABSTRACT
The emergence of a literature of belles lettres in Anglo-America reflected the success of the colonies: it meant there now existed a community of settlers who took settling the New World enough for granted not to write about it. Instead of histories, they wrote essays in which style mattered as much as content and sometimes more; they even wrote essays about essay-writing. In these literary pursuits, they did continue to reflect upon their location, but not as any sort of wilderness. Culturally the New World was quite comparable to the Old, they claimed; in fact, when one allowed for the difference in size, the communities of the cultivated in England and its colonies were no different. The belletrists would crown the colonizing mission by building Londons on the Chesapeake, the Hudson, and the Schuylkill.
