Rewriting American Identity: The Eighteenth-Century Americanizations of George Fisher’s Instructor and Sarah Trimmer’s Easy Introduction to the Knowledge of Nature

Abstract

Before and after the American Revolution, revised imprints of British works claiming to be adapted for American audiences appeared in the British North American colonies. The essay suggests that collating ‘Americanized’ reprints against their source texts can be a useful metric for determining how Anglo-Americans perceived themselves to be different from counterparts in Great Britain, as well as how these beliefs evolved over time. This is addressed through case studies of reprints of George Fisher’s Instructor and Sarah Trimmer’s Easy Introduction to the Knowledge of Nature, both popular instructional texts. Finally, the essay attempts to reimagine revised reprints as translations of national and local culture, if not of language.