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Toward a Declaration of Interdependence; or, Interrogating the Boundaries in Twentieth-Century Histories of North American Literature

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Marietta Messmer
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Extract

The instrumentalization of nineteenth-century literary historiography in the project of literary and cultural nation building has become a critical commonplace, as Claudio Guillén (6) and David Perkins (4), among many others, have outlined. Beginning with John Neal's American Writers (1824–25), nineteenth-century histories of North American literature emphatically embraced this nationalist paradigm, striving to identify and defend the “American” qualities in America's newly emergent national literature. But when called on, at the beginning of the twentieth century, to justify the establishment of American literature departments in universities across the country, literary histories were, especially during the 1920s and 1930s, under even greater pressure to prove the extent to which American literature is indeed American (Vanderbilt 186–91). Although the rise of New Criticism and the influence of Russian formalism after World War II saw a temporary setback to American historiographical nationalism (Spengemann, Mirror 154), the subsequent institutionalization of American studies took place in the context of the cold war, and the 1960s, in particular, brought a renewed emphasis on the (for the most part nationally oriented) sociopolitical and historical contextualization of American literature. And even the shift to intra-American cultural pluralism in the wake of trans- and subnational challenges to traditional notions of the nation-state throughout the past few decades has all too frequently been accompanied by renewed attempts to establish a revised version of historiographical nationalism.

Type
Special Topic: America: The Idea, the Literature
Information
PMLA , Volume 118 , Issue 1: Special Topic: America: The Idea, the Literature , January 2003 , pp. 41 - 55
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2003

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