The Female American was, until recently, a little-known anonymous novel tracing the transatlantic adventures of a bi-racial, multilingual castaway-turned-missionary named Unca Eliza Winkfield. Critics now see its alternative constructions of individualism and gender as a challenge to canonical novels such as Robinson Crusoe or Pamela . This essay focuses on the novel's many oddities— not least the fantastical island setting with its central oracle statue worshipped by the local natives— in order to demonstrate that The Female American is an ironic pastiche of images and texts about the Americas. The oracle statue, which Unca Eliza improbably uses to convert the natives, mirrors Enlightenment debates about pagan prognostication at a time when ancient and indigenous paganisms were systematically compared. Although Enlightenment writers demystified pagan oracles, they did not renounce the mystical experience that animated them. Similarly, the novel's oracle statue, which is a mechanical object, is never unveiled as such, and thus ironically mediates the immaterial world of spirits. This imbrication with the unreal reveals fissures not only in some of the social aspects of the realistic novel, but in the fundaments of Ian Watt's formal realism.

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Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur’s French version of his Letters from an American Farmer is at once inextricably linked to, but wholly different from, his English manuscripts. This essay proposes that a study of this overlooked bilingual text should begin by forgoing a comparison of the two versions and instead investigate Crèvecoeur’s bilingualism in its eighteenth-century trans-Atlantic context. An account of Crèvecoeur’s bilingual code-switching, his linguistic affect, and his commitment to language acquisition reveals the complex interrelation of languages in his nomadic life. At a time when using more than one language was not anomalous, but in tension with attempts to establish a stable national vernacular, Crèvecoeur’s case also illuminates frictions in the Atlantic’s linguistic ecology. This essay demonstrates that multilingualism and a standardized national language were not competitors, but coexisted in a fragile linguistic habitat.

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