American World Literature: An Introduction

Paul Giles

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781119431800
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

A scholarly review of American world literature from early times to the postmodernist era

American World Literature: An Introduction explores how the subject of American Literature has evolved from a national into a global phenomenon. As the author, Paul Giles – a noted expert on the topic – explains, today American Literature is understood as engaging with the wider world rather than merely with local or national circumstances. The book offers an examination of these changing conceptions of representation in both a critical and an historical context.

The author examines how the perception of American culture has changed significantly over time and how this has been an object of widespread social and political debate. From examples of early American literature to postmodernism, the book charts ways in which the academic subject areas of American Literature and World Literature have converged – and diverged – over the past generations.

Written for students of American literature at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels and in all areas of historical specialization, American World Literature offers an authoritative guide to global phenomena of American World literature and how this subject has undergone crucial changes in perception over the past thirty years.

1
The Theory of American World Literature

This book is designed to offer an overview of ways in which the subject areas of American literature and world literature have converged (and diverged) over the past 20 or 30 years. American literature is now widely regarded as engaging with global rather than merely local or national phenomena, and American World Literature: An Introduction attempts to set these changing conceptions of the subject in both critical and historical context. It also suggests how this perception of American literature as a global or “world” phenomenon has varied significantly across time, so that the intellectual investments of Cotton Mather in ideas of universal forms during the seventeenth century can be productively compared and contrasted to the resurgence of nationalist and transnational templates in the poetry of Walt Whitman 200 years later. In his preface to Literary Theory: An Introduction, published in 1983, Terry Eagleton wrote of how he had “tried to popularize rather than vulgarize the subject,” and my intention here similarly is to address these complex historical and methodological issues in a way that might enlighten readers with little experience in the academic study of American literature, while still providing a sufficiently rounded view of these multifaceted matters to provoke interest in readers for whom the broad outlines of these debates will be more familiar.¹

The term “American literature” was first used in the 1780s, in the aftermath of the political separation of the new United States from Great Britain, and it has always carried a nationalistic resonance. In his 1837 lecture “The American Scholar,” given as a commencement address at Harvard, Ralph Waldo Emerson pointedly proclaimed how “[w]e have listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe,” but the fact that he did not say “we have listened too long to the philosophical sages of Asia,” still less “we have listened too long to the voices of indigenous peoples,” exemplifies the way in which American intellectual culture initially conceived of itself in terms of a principled resistance to the ossified structures of a class‐bound, aristocratic Europe.² The first university course in American literature was not taught until 1875, by Moses Coit Tyler at the University of Michigan, and the subject initially flourished in less prestigious Midwestern universities, where its demotic qualities were thought to carry a broad, popular appeal for a less sophisticated clientele. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, American literature became a popular subject in student classrooms, but it was not then thought of as an appropriate field for intense scholarly research. Just as the study of English literature was generally conceived in British universities of the Victorian era as a soft option compared with more rigorous study of the classics (Latin and Greek), so American literature was long regarded among Ivy League academics as an easy option. The story goes that when F.O. Matthiessen, perhaps the most influential American literary scholar of the twentieth century, first proposed at Harvard in 1926 a PhD on Walt Whitman, he was advised by senior professors there that Whitman was an “exhausted” topic, and that his time would be better spent on the arts of Elizabethan translation. Matthiessen consequently produced a thesis that examined five important Elizabethan prose translations: Sir Thomas Hoby’s rendering into English of Castiglione's The Courtier (1561), Sir Thomas North’s translation of Plutarch’s Lives (1579), John Florio’s translation of Montaigne’s Essays (1603), Philemon Holland’s translations of Livy’s Roman History (1600), and of Suetonius (1606).³ A revised version of this dissertation was published in 1931 as Translation: An Elizabethan Art, and it is not difficult to see how a similar kind of quintuple method underpinned by a critical idiom of transposition also underpins the structure of Matthiessen’s most celebrated work, American Renaissance (1941). Just as Translation focuses on the way in which English scholars converted five European classics into their native tongue, so American Renaissance seeks deliberately to prove to Harvard skeptics that Matthiessen’s five chosen American writers – Emerson, Whitman, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville – are as good as anything produced in the English Renaissance. The critical method again works through analogy, with American writers being set metaphorically within a comparative framework.

Matthiessen’s work helped significantly to consolidate a field that had been given institutional momentum by the founding of an American literature group at the Modern Language Association of America (MLA) in 1921, and then by the establishment of the academic journal American Literature in 1929. Many of these “Founding Fathers” of American literary studies – there were, of course, no “Founding Mothers” – conceived of the subject in explicitly comparative terms. Norman Foerster, for example, wrote in The Reinterpretation of American Literature (1929) of how “[m]ore fully than any other, American culture is derivative, and consequently the study of American literature is essentially a study of comparative literature, a study in the international history of ideas and their literary expression.”⁴ In this same volume, Howard Mumford Jones emphasized what he called the “provincialism” of merely stressing “the Americanism of American literature,” and he declared that Americanists must put aside their “morbid fear” that “comparisons” with writers such as “Shakespeare, Goethe or Dante” would prove “odious.” Instead, wrote Mumford Jones, “we must group Europe and the United States into the homogeneous unity of Western culture; and seek to determine by comparison the differences and likenesses between them.”⁵ Again, “Western culture” is assumed to be the fulcrum of world civilization, and America is considered to be an interesting and significant variant in relation to this broader picture.

There were, of course, other influential voices at this time that sought to move beyond a narrowly formalist approach to this emerging subject. A.M. Schlesinger specifically criticized the first Cambridge History of American Literature, published in 1919, for not taking sufficiently into account the material culture and social context from which American literature had emerged. Citing the importance in US culture of such factors as “the popularization of the telephone, motor car, movie, and radio, and legislative attitudes toward such questions as censorship, international copyright, and a tariff on foreign bonds,” Schlesinger argued in 1929 that “the development of literature is constantly affected by the forces which condition the whole course of social growth.”⁶ He thus anticipated a significant strand in Americanist criticism that sought not to treat letters as a privileged world apart but to relate literature to the social and political conditions that had produced it. This approach was also epitomized by V.L. Parrington’s critical trilogy Main Currents in American Thought (1927–1930), which sought to align the development of American literature with a socially progressive agenda, driven by a democratic idealism that identified with the rural qualities of Jeffersonian populism and abhorred what Parrington considered the destructive influences of capitalist business and elitist social hierarchies. Parrington’s introduction declared explicitly his intention to consider the transmission to America of certain old‐world “ideals and institutions, and the subjection of those ideals and institutions to the pressure of a new environment, from which resulted the overthrows of the principles of monarchy and aristocracy, and the setting up of the principle of republicanism.”⁷ Such a critical pattern linking literature to society became more widespread during the Great Depression years of the 1930s, as scholars sought increasingly to explicate American literature in terms of its radical cultural politics and its differences from, rather than similarities to, European models. It was this nationalist slant, stressing the differential nature of the American domain, which crucially informed the development of the American studies movement. This was given institutional shape by the foundation of the American Studies Association (ASA) in 1951 and by the first appearance of what was subsequently to become the ASA’s official journal, American Quarterly, in 1949.

What is important to note, however, is that a dialectical double strand, involving the question of whether American literature should be seen as belonging specifically to the nation or to the wider world, has been inherent within the formation of this subject since its earliest days. The initial identification of American literature as a field of inquiry was driven as much by public affairs as by academic arguments. William E. Cain has written of how the first half of the twentieth century “was the period when American literature took shape as a subject and scholarly field,” and he regards the fact that the case for American literature “was made inside and outside the academy” as representing “one of the most formidable achievements of modernism,” bringing American literary culture into dialogue with a wider world.⁸

The visibility of American literature was significantly enhanced by the entry of the United States into World War I in April 1917 – poet ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• 1 The Theory of American World Literature
• 2 Early American Literature in the World
• 3 National/Global
• 4 The Worlds of American Modernism
• 5 Postmodernism, Globalization, and US Literary Culture
• Index
• End User License Agreement