I'm BRITISH, don't you know.

As we talked about in class this week, John Cheever's writing can be seen as "uniquely American". Now I don't know about you, but I'm not entirely sure I agree with this. In what ways are his writings uniquely American? The predominant 'American-ness' of his writing comes from a very small selection of factors. Location (rather obviously) plays a huge part in this. His characters are Americans and they live typically American lives in their own pursuit of 'The American Dream'. Well, so do a lot of other American writers. And yet it is Cheever who is described as being uniquely American.
Take for instance Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser, published at the turn of the 20th Century. This example of American literature could be described as uniquely American - Dreiser's narrative comments on the social hierarchy of the States in the late 1890's and early 1900's, and the rise and fall of the American Dream. Or Edgar Allen Poe; his dark, mysterious and macabre works could equally be seen as an embodiment of a uniquely American style. The same could be said for F. Scott Fitzgerald, Earnest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, Sylvia Plath, Jack Kerouac or Cormac McCarthy. All of these writers adapt and adopt conventions of literature to produce a style of writing that can be described as being uniquely American.
To be unique means to be one of a kind. In my opinion, John Cheever's works are not one of a kind. This is not to say that they are not any good, because they undoubtedly are. I simply resent an inaccurate label.
In the same sense, what factors would deem a piece of literature 'uniquely British'? Of course, all the typical British clichés spring to mind; bad weather, bad teeth, a general tolerance for queuing, a general dislike of the French, a love of tea and scones, and a potty mouth. In this respect, however, we ought to look at the typical clichés of America; fat, lazy, fanatically patriotic, unintelligent and homophobic. So for literature to be seen as holding uniquely British or American concepts, they must embody one or all of these stereotypes.
Let us not forget, however, that these are stereotypes; they are hyperbolic notions of societies which are frequently talked and written about. They are not an honest or reliable depiction of a society. Perhaps, rather than focussing on these well-known stereotypes, we would do better to look deeper into the context of a piece of literature, at the era in which it is written and at the political/social/economic concerns of the time, and how that reflects on the supposed ‘British-ness’ or ‘American-ness’ of the piece.