Аннотация

The problem of the cultural self-identification was very important for the US press in the end of the XVIII - the first half of the XIX centuries. The problems of national culture were widely discussed mainly in the literary and critical magazines. The first attempts to set the new standards for the national culture remained in the memory as rather curios things. Published in "The Connecticut Magazine" Joel Barlow's "The Vision of Columbus" in 1787 was considered by the contemporaries as the best result of the new American literature that could be the brand of the cultural export. The serious attempts to find the parameters of the national culture were done by Charles Brockden Brown in his "The American Review and Literary Journal" (1802) and continued by Joseph Dennie (the editor of Philadelphian magazine "The Port Folio"), William Tudor (the editor of Boston magazine "The North American Review") Peter Irwing in "The Morning Chronicle" in New York. They tried to organize the national critical movement in order to support the national literature. The creative activity of Washington Irving approached to the European standards. But the ironical question of the influential British critic Sydney Smith ("In the four quarters of the globe, who reads an American book? or goes to an American play? or looks at an American picture or statue?") published in "The Edinburgh Review" sounded as the British challenge for the American culture in the making. The answer for Smith's question the US press tried to formulate for thirty years.