Abstract
This chapter surveys several early forms of literary historiography. Some were called “lectures” (e.g., Samuel Knapp’s Lectures on American Literature), others resembled biographical sketches rather than a “literary history.” Not all of them would count as literary histories following today’s understanding of this scholarly genre since they did not give teleological, consistent accounts of how literature evolved. However, these texts represent significant anticipatory forms of literary historiography that were meant to store a cultural memory with a transatlantic inflection.
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Notes
- 1.
There is a telling passage in the 1948 preface to the Literary History of the United States, where it is stated that “[e]ach generation should produce at least one literary history of the United States, for each generation must define the past in its own terms” (qtd. in Link 1, emphasis in the original). Literary historiography, following this understanding, requires perpetual self-renewal and a redefinition of what “history” or “past” means for a certain generation.
- 2.
White writes that “[i]t is sometimes said that the aim of the historian is to explain the past by ‘finding,’ ‘identifying,’ or ‘uncovering’ the ‘stories’ that lie buried in chronicles; and that the difference between ‘history’ and ‘fiction’ resides in the fact that the historian ‘finds’ his stories, whereas the fiction writer ‘invents’ his. This conception of the historian’s task, however, obscures the extent to which ‘invention’ also plays a part in the historian’s operations” (6–7).
- 3.
Most studies begin with the 1840s and 1850s at the earliest. A representative example of this tendency is the database “Covers, Titles, and Tables: The Formations of American Literary Canons,” hosted by the University of Texas at Arlington. It lists several hundreds of cover pages and table of contents of American literary histories. The earliest title it contains is Tyler’s A History of American Literature. It remains, however, the only example from the nineteenth century.
- 4.
Winfried Fluck has approached this problem in terms of an “infancy thesis” of American literature. At its heart lies the narrative model of the rise of the novel inherited from the British tradition (“From Aesthetics to Political Criticism” 225) and the widely-spread belief that the American novel—defined according to British norms—only began to bloom in the middle of the nineteenth century, disregarding the merits of the early American novel.
- 5.
One could take this idea even further and argue that these early American literary histories anticipated the deconstructive turn, which also seized the genre of literary historiography in the twentieth century by putting into practice a continual self-interrogation of their methods and means.
- 6.
The author who most openly bemoaned the lax copyright situation in the United States was Rufus Wilmot Griswold, who, in his Prose of Writers of America, repeatedly mentions the detrimental effect the lack of international copyright had on the situation of American writers. The publication of foreign works proved to be much cheaper for publishers than that of native authors, whose work, unlike that of authors from abroad, received no legal protection (5; 15). On the copyright situation in the United States in the nineteenth century, see also Schreyer and, from a transatlantic perspective, Bautz.
- 7.
Sandra Tomc has examined the rise of conspicuous author personalities in America in Industry and the Creative Mind: The Eccentric Writer in American Literature and Entertainment, 1790–1860 (2012). On the cult surrounding Lord Byron as a star author, see the studies by Ghislaine McDayter (Byromania and the Birth of Celebrity Culture, 2009) and Tom Mole (Byron’s Romantic Celebrity, 2007). On the emergence of female celebrity authors in Britain and the United States, see Brenda Weber.
- 8.
- 9.
William Charvat in Literary Publishing in America, 1790–1850 established an understanding of authorship as something defined by the exclusivity of writing as the only profession and source of income for a writer. In America, this turn toward professionalism was only achieved toward the middle of the nineteenth century, preceded by a period of amateurism. Most recently, Charvat’s approach was challenged by Leon Jackson, who, in The Business of Letters (2008), focuses on writers whose professional status is less easily identifiable. On authorship in America more generally see the respective studies by Grantland Rice (The Transformation of Authorship in America, 1997) and Mark Rose (Authors and Owners, 1995).
- 10.
Chambers’s work also has meaningful transatlantic implications. It contains “a history of American contributions to the English language and literature,” as announced in its subtitle, which reflects Chambers’s “united in language” approach to his account of English literature. The editor of an early American edition of Chambers’s book, Reverend Royal Robbins, focuses on the representation of American writing in Chambers’s History in his preface. While admitting that from among the 1,000 authors that belong to American literature (iv) it must have been hard for Chambers to choose, he bemoans the small proportion of American writers included (iii). The American authors who Chambers did consider were, e.g., Benjamin Franklin, John Trumbull, Timothy Dwight, David Humphreys, Washington Irving, and Fenimore Cooper. Still, Robbins praises Chambers’s achievement in producing an important textbook also useful for teaching (v) and emphasizes the close link between American and English literature, even though the former is “modified by our peculiar institutions and by the spirit of christianity [sic]” (v).
- 11.
Equally important was William John Courthope’s History of English Poetry in six volumes (1895–1910). Together with the 15-volume Cambridge History of English Literature, the latter can be regarded as the earliest example of a literary history resembling our present-day understanding of the genre, its form and function (see Stierstorfer 19–20). Both came out at the end of the nineteenth century respectively early in the twentieth century only.
- 12.
Another important factor that contributed toward the formation of the canon was a change of copyright in Great Britain in 1774, which meant that literature became a part of the public domain (with the end of perpetual copyright), and its status as of public concern (being public property) was enhanced (see e.g., Reginald McGinnis’s collection of essays Originality and Intellectual Property in the French and English Enlightenment for discussions of the situation in Europe and Brake 37).
- 13.
Major paradigms of historiography changed in the nineteenth century, “when the historicist school brought the teleological model of idealist philosophy into disrepute” (7). Periodization, according to Jauss, supported the historicist cause. Periods were seen as “an individual meaningful whole” (7) behind which the historian and his viewpoint in the present disappeared, and which did not require an idealist belief in goal-oriented development in order for history to make sense.
- 14.
The New York Friendly Club’s history has been investigated, most recently, by Bryan Waterman in Republic of Intellect (2007) and by Thomas Bender in New York Intellect (1988).
- 15.
In an American context, Noah Webster’s work as the gatekeeper of American English needs to be mentioned (see Micklethwait).
- 16.
For a discussion of the reception of classical authors in pre-Revolutionary America, see John C. Shields’s The American Aeneas (2011). Carl J. Richard’s The Golden Age of the Classics in America (2009) covers the antebellum period and Caroline Winterer’s The Mirror of Antiquity (2007) examines the response of female American authors to the classical tradition.
- 17.
See, for example, Emig 49 and 57 and Kahn 1–26.
- 18.
Plutarch’s Lives were listed in the 1741 catalog of the Library Company of Philadelphia, for example (Anon., A Catalogue 23). It is, in fact, important to recall the impact of classical texts in translation in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As has been shown by Thomas F. Bonnell, translations of works by Homer, Virgil, Hesiod, Pindar, and Heraclite were regularly reissued by British publishers in affordable formats and also circulated internationally (283). In 1912, Harvard University Press launched its Loeb Classical Library, which has ever since been devoted to the publishing of Latin and Greek works in English.
- 19.
For example, not much further on in the same lecture, he thinks that a book by Timothy Pitkin is “a valuable work” (131). Again, he gives his reason: “The writer has laboured more to show causes and to develop principles, than to round periods and polish metaphors” (131). In both instances Knapp reviews works positively because they develop and apply a certain methodology. To judge from his statements, it was systematic and analytical books—rather than those that are descriptive or boastful of their authors’ verbal skills—that met his approval. He appreciates authors who not merely compile material but work toward a structured understanding of their subject, be it history or medicine, which also reflects his own approach. He looks back to preceding chaotic times, but then argues that Americans had now achieved some kind of solid basis from which to reach “literary distinction” themselves, now that “things have become well settled upon true principles” (188).
- 20.
A similar attitude can be found in Charles Brockden Brown’s essay “Remarks on Reading” from 1806, where the author displays a laissez faire attitude toward hierarchies between old and new, both having valuable works to offer. There are some readers who “only read old books, as if there were no valuable truths to be discovered in modern ones, while others will only read new books, as if some valuable truths are not among the old” (999).
- 21.
Moramarco does not provide a full confirmation of Dunlap’s authorship of the “Theatrical Register” series, but considers it as “very likely” (9) that Dunlap wrote it.
- 22.
On drama and the theatre in colonial America respectively the young United States, see Richards, Drama, Theatre, and Identity in the American New Republic (2005), Jason Shaffer, Performing Patriotism (2007), Rosemarie Bank, Theater Culture in America, 1825–1860 (1997), and Engle and Miller, eds., The American Stage (1993). On the reception of William Shakespeare’s works in the United States see Michael D. Bristol’s Shakespeare’s America, America’s Shakespeare (1990), Vaughan and Vaughan’s Shakespeare in America (2012), and the article-length discussions by Engler respectively Rippl.
- 23.
Sharper criticism came from Britain: in the Examiner, Dunlap’s History was dismissed as “staple commodity here offered by an American manager to the British public,” which did not offer the kind of “vivid sketches” and “striking pictures” one would find in Colley Cibber, for example. The “quarrel and ruin of managers, the jealousies and vanities of actors” were “dry and unprofitable matters” (Anon., “The Literary Examiner”).
- 24.
Dunlap, despite the liveliness with which he divulges his memories, was a Puritan at heart. He for instance suggested that prostitutes, since they could not be prevented from attending stage performances, ought to be segregated from the rest of the audience (see Bank, “Staging Gender” 66–67).
- 25.
The History was dedicated to Dunlap’s friend James Fenimore Cooper. It was issued by subscription and printed in London in two volumes in 1833. Dunlap could live off the revenue of the English and American editions together (Coad 112–13).
- 26.
Poe, when writing about “the value of mere fame” (22), anticipates Barbara Herrnstein Smith’s distinction of a particular kind of value that is generated by a work’s mere persistence over time (50). What he implies is that the attention that the public bestows upon a particular writer endows him with “value,” no intrinsic achievement being required.
- 27.
One example comes from the description of William M. Gillespie, who was involved in periodical publishing in New York. “In person,” Poe writes, “he is about five feet seven inches high, neither stout nor thin, angularly proportioned; eyes large and dark hazel, hair dark and curling, an ill-formed nose, fine teeth, and a smile of peculiar sweetness; nothing remarkable about the forehead. The general expression of the countenance when in repose is rather unprepossessing, but animation very much alters its character[.] He is probably 30 years of age—unmarried” (35). When writing about women, he is even more detailed; he for example mentions the “brilliant and even teeth and flexible lips” (44) of Anna Cora Mowatt, for whose literary achievements he is full of praise. At times, his combination of critical insight, studies in physiognomy and even sensual observations comes across as a bewildering feature in a text that is meant to deride the hypocrisies of the city’s literary world, but seems to perpetuate the trivialities it mocks.
- 28.
With Gems from American Female Poets, published in 1842, Griswold published the first all-female anthology in the United States. However, statements such as “[i]t is less easy to be assured of the genuineness of literary ability in women than in men” (in his Preface to The Female Poets 7) remind us of an inherent sexism. Several anthologies of female writing were published in the 1880s. Between 1848 and 1849 alone, three anthologies of American women’s poetry appeared: Caroline May’s The American Female Poets, Thomas Buchanan Read’s The Female Poets, and Rufus W. Griswold’s eponymous collection (see Bennett 17).
- 29.
As of the 1770s, it became more and more fashionable in Britain to own and/or display portraits of poets, also in private homes; besides, author portraits were included in anthologies and multi-volume collections of poetry, for example (see Bonnell 14–15).
- 30.
In his address to the reader in Gems from American Female Poets, Griswold stated that, beginning with Anne Bradstreet, “the country has never been without minstrels of the gentler sex, some of whom, as the pages of this book show, have written true poetry” (“To the Reader” 9). He thus does not think too highly of female writers in general. Equally interesting is his postulation of “the purest moral character” that he discerns in “[n]early all American poetry” (10).
- 31.
In 1891, international copyright legislation was introduced in the United States under the International Copyright Act. This law protected foreign publications in the United States, i.e., it became far less attractive for American publishers to publish foreign, especially British, publications.
- 32.
Griswold thus sees literature as a suitable means to explore the past by turning it into fiction. In this regard, a parallel can be drawn to William Gilmore Simms’s essay “History for the Purposes of Art,” which appeared in Simms’s collection of essays called Views and Reviews from 1845. Simms describes the artist as the “true historian” (25), who employs a “creative faculty,” and he ascribes to art the function of breathing life into otherwise dead historical matter. “The chief value of history,” Simms writes, “consists in its proper employment for the purposes of art” (23).
- 33.
For Nietzsche, the study of the past that is no longer in the service of the present results in a desiccated, sterile collection of useless, irrelevant information. He writes: “Antiquarian history itself degenerates from the moment it is no longer animated and inspired by the fresh life of the present. Its piety withers away, the habit of scholarliness continues without it and rotates in egoistic self-satisfaction around its own axis. Then there appears the repulsive spectacle of a blind rage for collecting, a restless raking together of everything that has ever existed” (“On the Uses” 75).
- 34.
Griswold’s anthologies had a big impact on the editors of the Cambridge History of American Literature, which appeared between 1913 and 1921 and would shape the historical understanding of American literature of generations of readers and students to come (Vanderbilt 49).
- 35.
Its title recalls a British equivalent, i.e., Robert Chambers’s Cyclopaedia of English Literature: a Selection of the Choicest Productions of English Authors, from the Earliest to the Present Time, connected by Critical and Biographical History, a two-volume publication that came out in 1843, incorporated selected texts ordered according to periods and genres. It included brief historical accounts which introduced the various periods, and was critically reviewed in American periodicals upon its publication, and far beyond. It was reviewed, for example, in The North American Review in July 1847 (Anon., “Cyclopaedia of English Literature,” and, even as late as in 1879, in The Literary World (Anon., “Chambers’s Cyclopaedia”).
- 36.
Not much research has been done on the Duyckincks and their literary histories. A good source for biographical information and an assessment of their contribution to the field is Chapter 5 in Kermit Vanderbilt’s American Literature and the Academy (61–79).
- 37.
On the American book market and vending practices in the nineteenth century see Michael Winship (discussing trade sales and book fairs); on the (regional) situation of the book trade in the eighteenth century, see the contributions in Amory and Hall by Winton and Amory.
- 38.
The commercialization of the anthology meant that “serious” anthologies had to compete with the glossier annuals and gift books such as Godey’s Lady’s Book, and Ladies’ American Magazine (1840–1843), a magazine that contained both literature and fashion, but, importantly, came across as a stylish and elegant publication (Vanderbilt 55).
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Straub, J. (2017). Early Forms of Literary Historiography in America: Literary Histories as Narrative Anthologies. In: The Rise of New Media 1750–1850. The New Urban Atlantic. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-58168-6_5
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